Makom 3 - Humanities Blogs - University of Chicago

January 2013 

3 Tevet 5773 The 

“Phinehas, Abraham, and 

the Ethics of Imagination” 

Michael Francus 

“The Universality of 

Suffering” 

Michal Goldschmidt 

“How Jewish Was the 

Holocaust?” 

Jon Catlin 

Symposium: 

“Sociology or Theology” 

Jonathan Nathan 

Dory Fox 

Kayla Kirshenbaum 

Eric Singerman 

Avi Levin 

“She Got What She 

Deserved” 

Leah Reis Dennis 

“Great Art and the 

Unending Story of Joseph” 

Gabriel Shapiro 

MAKOM 

UNIVERSITY 

OF CHICAGO 

University of Chicago’s Undergraduate Journal of Jewish Thought

MAKOM 

UNIVERSITY 

OF CHICAGO 

Mission Statement 

Makom aims to provide undergraduates from the University of Chicago and 

elsewhere with a forum for serious intellectual engagement with Jewish topics. 

Targeted specifically at undergraduates and drawing upon the Chicago Center 

for Jewish Studies, Makom seeks to create a space that is serious enough to 

stimulate genuine and fulfilling discourse while comfortable enough to 

encourage undergraduates to take risks in their thinking and writing about 

Jewish issues. Of particular relevance are Jewish students who want to 

engage with their Jewishness in a more intellectual way, and students of all 

backgrounds who are interested in Jewish studies but whose primary academic 

focus is in a different area. For the former, Makom offers a space in which the 

intellectual life that is characteristic of the University can be applied specifically 

to exploring Jewish identity, and for the latter, a space in which they can safely 

investigate their academic interests in Jewish studies. Ultimately, Makom 

strives to cultivate a rich undergraduate discourse on Jewish topics, to connect 

undergraduates with the Center for Jewish Studies, and to contribute to both 

the academic and Jewish communities of the University of Chicago. 

Editorial Policy 

Makom encourages submissions from undergraduate students interested in 

Jewish studies in the form of essays, articles, reviews, works of art, opinion 

pieces, and letters to the editor. Submissions will be accepted and published on 

the basis of their relevance to Makom’s mission statement, space available, and 

on their intellectual and creative merit. However, Makom reserves the right to 

decline to publish submissions based on the discretion of the editors, and to 

edit any material submitted for publication for spelling, grammar, length, and 

both legal and professional standards of journalistic integrity. No anonymous 

submissions will be published. 

Commitment to Intellectual Diversity 

Makom is dedicated to appropriately representing undergraduates’ diversity of 

views on Jewish issues. Our commitment is to serious intellectual engagement 

with Judaism and Jewishness, not to any specific stances that such engagement 

may take. As such, the opinions articulated herein are to be understood as 

solely those of the authors, and not necessarily reflective of the Makom editorial 

board. 

Table of Contents 

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MAKOM 

UNIVERSITY 

OF CHICAGO 

The University of Chicago’s Undergraduate Journal of Jewish Thought 

January 2013 / Tevet 5773, Issue No. 3 

Letter from the Editor-in-Chief 


Phinehas, Abraham, and the Ethics of Imagination 


The Universality of Suffering: A Theological Commentary on Chagall’s 

White Crucifixion 


How Jewish was the Holocaust? 

Jon Catlin 

Symposium: Sociology and Theology in Jewish Religious Practice 

Jonathan Nathan, Dory Fox, Kayla Kirshenbaum, Eric Singerman, and Avi Levin 

“She Got What She Deserved”: Representations of Transgressive 

Womanhood in Jewish Literature, 1900-1924 

Leah Reis-Dennis 

Great Art and the Unending Story of Joseph 


Cover Art: Linoleum print 

Zara Fishkin 

3

Letter from the Editor-in-Chief: 

Transitions of Power 

Makom is taking a stand. 

This year has been marked by the politics of power. The taste of electoral 

vitriol still ruins family dinners; proclamations and riots in Egypt, civil war in Syria, 

violence between Hammas and Israel are not half of the upheaval in the Middle 

East; and at home, in Chicago, a cantankerous teachers strike followed a shockingly 

bloody summer. These are all, in their way, the politics of power. Indeed, 

power and its practitioners are ineradicable from our very un-messianic world, 

but the fears and pressures that they engender don’t belong everywhere. They are 

not at home in earnest and thoughtful discussion—in Makom. We at Makom, and 

you at home, write, read and think about the things that we find most important. 

We fill a makom—place, space—with these activities and it becomes secure from 

power-relations and their corrupting influences. For one must be free from fear to 

think honestly and write earnestly; conversely, one must speak earnestly and think 

honestly for others to feel secure themselves. On the one hand, the honest, earnest, 

and insightful discussion that Makom seeks to contain presupposes the security of 

its discussants. On the other hand, the requisite security of these discussants exists 

anew with each new discussion conducted in common honesty and earnestness. 

Makom seeks to meet a need amongst undergraduates who wish to think honestly 

and speak earnestly about Jewish subjects but who do not pursue Jewish Thought as 

a course of study. With each issue a newly secure space must be fashioned. Indeed, 

Makom is not only a journal meant to afford thinkers of Jewish thoughts a critical 

and galvanizing intellectual environment but one that is brought into existence by 

the thought and writing and reading that makes it up. An issue of Makom is not a 

production of an existing institution but a world thriving or dying under its own 

coherent structure. An issue of Makom is a world that consists in the thoughts and 

words of its contributors, editors, and readers. 

In the introduction to his Commentary on the Mishna, Maimonides discusses 

the roles of prophets and scholars. The scholar seeks to bring a text or tradition 

to understanding. His methods are clear, his tools well known. To succeed, the 

scholar must exercise great care and clarity of thought and argument. The prophet’s 

tools are obscure, unknown, and oracular. Thus the prophet can command but not 

interpret. 1 A prophet’s prophetic command to violate the Shabbat, in Maimonides’s 

mashal 2 holds authority, but his definition of Shabbat does not. The prophet can 

command one to disregard the law, the text, the tradition but the prophet does not 

reveal the truth about Shabbat. For that one needs the scholar. The care and clarity 

with which the scholar approaches scholarship is fundamental to the transmission 

Letter from the Editor-in-Chief 

of tradition between generations. 3 This tradition may not be touched by prophecy. 

The editors—who have worked with immense care and deep respect—seek to be 

scholarly rather than prophetic in their work on Makom. Dory, Doni, and Jon have 

each surprised me with their intelligence and facility. They have practiced clarity of 

thought, patience, and care in this issue. Together, we have taken Makom as it was 

laid before us by its worthy founders and have carefully and painstakingly sought to 

perfect it on its own term, always eschewing the politics of power. 

Intergenerational transition places this issue in the context of Makom’s 

history. Makom has had fantastic founders. Perhaps the most relevant and just 

remark I can make in introducing this third issue is that the Makom community 

and its editors are deeply grateful to the founders of this journal, Ethan Schwartz 

and Danya Lagos, for their work and their success. We hope to make their creation 

into tradition and the space they marked out for Makom only more full of thought 

about Judaism and Jewishness. 

Transmission of tradition with care, respect, and clarity is the means by 

which this issue has come to exist, and readings make up a large part of its content. 

If there were a subtitle to this issue, it would be “readings.” Michael Francus presents 

a theory of ethics through readings of the Biblical stories of Phineas and Abraham; 

Michal Goldschmidt reads Marc Chagall’s White Crucifixion for its universal 

theological meaning; Jon Catlin assesses tellings of the Holocaust; Leah Reis-Dennis 

reviews early twentieth-century Jewish Literature with an eye to transgressive 

sexualities; and I discuss great art, Joseph, and the possibility of distance from the 

Biblical narrative. Besides all this, we have five wonderful pieces in our symposium, 

“Sociology or Theology.” 

Intergenerational transitions of leadership, transmissions of tradition, and 

interpretations of texts are vulnerable to the corrupting influences of the politics 

of power. On these three fronts and in its own Jewish way, Makom is taking a 

stand. By manifesting a transition governed by respect and care, by conscientiously 

upholding the character of our journal, and by reading as much as we can with 

compassion rather than force, another issue of Makom and another makom for Jewish 

thought has come to be. 

Notes 


Editor-in-chief 

1 Maimonides, Hakdamot L’ferush Hamishna, 12th Edition, ed. Mordcai Dov Rabinowitz 

(Jerusalem: Mosad Harav Kook, 1988), page 22 

2 This is his word—probably the best translation for it in this context is “parable.” 

3 Just after his mashal, Maimonides discusses the transmission of tradition. 

5

Phinehas, Abraham, and the Ethics of 

Imagination 


Introduction 

The story of Phinehas is a thorny case for Jewish ethics, one that poses problems 

on multiple fronts and remains unsettling. In this paper, I offer a new approach 

to the story, one that sees Phinehas in terms of a structure of Jewish ethics that relies 

not only on biblical law, but also on the individual. More specifically, I employ the 

case of Phinehas to illustrate the caveat that one may in some cases act outside the 

biblical law despite that law’s claim to normative completeness—namely, that the 

dictates of the biblical law provide the correct course of action in any situation. Thus, 

while the Bible’s law offers prescriptions for every situation, the Bible also describes 

some situations—tests—in which the biblical law is insufficient. To show this, I will 

analyze Phinehas’s case and that of the Binding of Isaac through the new framework, 

and show how it provides a helpful understanding of the thornier ethical cases present 

in the Bible and in Jewish ethics in general. 

A Sketch 

The text (Numbers 25: 1-16) opens with Phinehas confronting a shameful 

scene in the desert: the Israelites have been led astray by Moabite women and Israelite 

worship of Ba’al is rampant. Consequently, God sends a plague upon the Israelites. 

Further, God orders Moses to tell the judges of Israel to kill the sinners, but before 

the judges carry out their sanguinary task, Zimri and Cozbi enter the public space 

by the Tent of Meeting to plead their case. The judges do not act, perhaps out of 

consideration for Zimri’s status within a leading family of the Simeonites. Suddenly, 

Phinehas raises his spear, heads for the pair, and skewers them, assuaging God’s wrath 

and ending the plague. As a reward, God bestows the “covenant of peace” and the 

“covenant of priesthood” upon Phinehas. 

Ethical Enigmas 

Phinehas’s case presents four interconnected enigmas. The first is that of 

zealotry, or ethical action beyond the law. Biblical law provides a normatively complete 

ethical code; consequently, it claims to give the correct ethical prescription for 

every situation. Given such completeness, acting outside of the law’s prescription 

should never lead to ethical action if the law’s claim is to be taken seriously. Yet in 

Phinehas’s case, it did. From the problem of zealotry arises the problem of law, that 

of prescribing ethical action. If zealotry can be acceptable and even ethical, then the 

weight that biblical law can carry comes into question. Once biblical law ceases to 

track the Ethical, it loses its grounding. Further, the question of thought; namely, 

Phinehas, Abraham, and the Ethics of Imagination 

that of determining ethical action, arises. If the law claims to be normatively complete 

and if zealotry is, at least on occasion, ethical, one must find a way of knowing 

when to follow law and when to be a zealot. The last enigma is Phinehas’s reward. 

While in many cases ethical action results in a reward (e.g. “honor thy father and 

mother so that you may live long” [Exodus 20:11]), unethical action does not. Further, 

not all ethical action, most notably killing, receives a particular reward. Samuel 

receives no special reward for killing Agag (I Samuel 15:33); nor do the Israelites for 

destroying Midian (Numbers 31:7), killing the wood gatherer (Numbers 15: 32-6), 

or stoning the man who curses God (Leviticus 24:10-23). Why, then, does Phinehas’s 

extralegal and unsanctioned killing merit a reward? 

Ethical Structure 

To understand the case of Phinehas, I will introduce a new scheme of Jewish 

ethics, one that relies on a distinction between God’s will and God’s communication 

with human beings. The former is by definition the Ethical, that which is introspected 

and desired by God; and the latter, its approximation. Given the limitations of human 

beings, we can never directly access the will of God—to do so would amount to 

sharing His mind. Consequently, God communicates with prophets and formulates 

the biblical law in order to provide human beings with a guide to the Ethical. This 

guide, however accurate and complete, is not itself the Ethical, but an approximation 

thereof that enables human beings to approach it. To understand this structure, 

consider a parallel case: our interaction with other minds. Suppose, for instance, that 

someone else is happy. He feels his own happiness, but I do not feel that happiness; 

instead, I see his smile and listen when he tells me that he is happy, and consequently 

I understand that he is happy. Likewise, I might also be made happy on my own or 

gladdened by his happiness, but my happiness is still distinct from his. In the same 

way, I do not introspect the Ethical in God’s mind, but understand it through various 

communications (prophecy, biblical law, etc.) and aspire to it. 

Consequently, biblical law and prophecy serve as excellent approximations 

of the Ethical (just as most smiles come from happy people). Nevertheless, the two 

are not the Ethical itself, for they exist outside of God. This raises the possibility 

for misalignment—tests—in which the communication does not track the Ethical. 

The case of Phinehas is in this category. He was tested because the communication 

(via biblical law) demanded that he not kill Zimri (“You shall not murder” [Exodus 

20:12]) while the Ethical demanded that he do so. Herein lies the justification of 

zealotry. Because every law derives from a communication, it may be the result of a 

misalignment: even if the general rules are perfect, God may send tests in which the 

situation demands action other than the dictated rules. As a result, zealotry—disregarding 

the communication—becomes acceptable. Further, the structure can explain 

law in light of its inevitable shortcomings. Despite the potential for misalignment, 

law is necessary because humans do not have direct access to the Ethical itself. With- 

7

8 MAKOM Michael Francus 

Phinehas, Abraham, and the Ethics of Imagination 9 

out law, a state in which all act as they see appropriate reigns and there is no basis for 

ethical action, as is noted in Deuteronomy 12:8. 1 With law, there is a heuristic that 

guides humans to the Ethical and prevents them from constantly erring. 

Now the question of reward can be answered. Phinehas’s reward derived 

from a specific type of ethical success. Not only did he achieve the Ethical; he did so 

by passing a test. Doing so, he achieved the Ethical not through its approximation, 

but rather by connecting directly to the will of God. By contrast, Samuel and the 

Israelites achieved the Ethical by its approximation—they followed divine communications, 

and consequently did not partake directly in the will of God. Phinehas’s 

rewards reflect this. The covenant of peace—berit shalom— shares an etymological 

root with the Hebrew word for completeness and recognizes Phinehas for bringing 

himself into a complete relationship with God—not just God’s communication, but 

the Ethical itself. Likewise, the priesthood represents a special connection with God 

as the Ethical and not just with the communication. 

The question of thought, though, remains. How did Phinehas recognize 

that the ethical action required of him was not what was prescribed by biblical law? 

Zimri similarly disobeyed the biblical law, but his outcome was death, not an eternal 

covenant. Surely we should be able to distinguish between the two cases. 

In most ethical situations, two tools serve as guides: faith and reason. Faith 

amounts to following divine communication and believing it to be the best approximation 

of the Ethical. Faith accepts the biblical law and treats it as the only standard 

for action—the law’s normative completeness demands a certain response. Nevertheless, 

for Phinehas the communication itself was erroneous, and thus faith could 

not aid him. Further, no reasoning could indicate that God’s communication was 

wrong—the law is ostensibly normatively complete, so reasoning could not demonstrate 

its inadequacy by exposing gaps in it. And Phinehas could not extrapolate 

from the law using reason either, as in his case the law was no longer the barometer 

of the Ethical. Reason requires a basis from which to work, and in this case that basis 

vanished, leaving Phinehas without tools. Again, we are drawn to the initial problem 

of ethical thought—what did Phinehas think when he embraced zealotry over law, 

and how did he know the Ethical outside of the legal? 

Imagine 

Herein lies the terror of existence. Phinehas did not know or reason through 

the ethics of his action. He imagined. One can never know or reason through the 

truly Ethical, using thought to fully understand God’s will—it is beyond human 

capacity. Phinehas had no method to ensure certainty and correctness; he could only 

imagine. He saw the judges’ inaction; he imagined the world as it was and as it would 

be; he envisioned Zimri and Cozbi not receiving their gruesome, public death; he 

envisioned the continuing plague and the death of Israelites. Parallel to this world, 

Phinehas imagined the biblical law chastising him, and he could see the communica- 

tion looming. He gazed upon the communication and envisioned the world it would 

mandate in his case. Then he stopped, for he could not imagine such a world, and 

one thought flashed before him: “It must be otherwise!” And with that, he cast aside 

the law and lifted his spear. 

On the other end of that spear was Zimri, justly skewered. Yet his act was 

eerily similar to Phinehas’s. Zimri, too, flaunted law, but rather than reward, punishment 

was his lot. And in this confusion we meet terror: at which end of the spear will 

we find ourselves? Life outside of law inevitably poses this question. We can lambast 

Zimri for his failure of imagination—not being able to imagine a world where idol 

worship and sexual transgression are wrong bespeaks either a stunning lack of imagination 

or (more plausibly) lack of interest in ethics. Nevertheless, there is no defined 

line in the realm of imagination; nor could there be. Only after we act do we learn 

which end of the spear we face. 

Abraham 

A look at Abraham, who confronts a similar ethical dilemma in the Binding 

of Isaac, will enable me to flesh out the ethical structure that undergirds Phinehas, 

and shed light on another ethical problem. While there are countless interpretations 

of the Binding of Isaac, I focus on Soren Kierkegaard’s, for its shortcomings show 

where my interpretation can resolve a number of difficulties. In Fear and Trembling, 2 

Kierkegaard constructs an understanding of the Binding of Isaac (Genesis 22:1-19) 

that explains the role of faith and Abraham’s greatness. He notes that Abraham faced 

the challenge of the Ethical contradicting the command of God. Abraham had full 

knowledge of both the command to kill Isaac and the ethical duty of a father to his 

son. 3 Placed in this paradox of God against the ethical, Abraham chose God, reaffirming 

himself as a knight of faith through his acceptance of the absolute duty to 

God. On this view, Kierkegaard places faith above the ethical, and claims that faith is 

the very paradox of an individual transcending the ethical. One has an absolute duty 

to God and must resist the temptation of the ethical in order to become a knight of 

faith, which is the apogee of human existence. 4 Thus, we live in fear and trembling as 

we work our way to salvation by embracing God above all else—including the ethical 

and the rational. For achieving this level of faith, Abraham was rewarded with Isaac 

and the blessing of prosperity. By resisting the ethical, Abraham proved himself and 

achieved the heroic status afforded him by Kierkegaard. 

But upon reflection, Abraham’s reward seems meager and his course of action 

partially erroneous. After the Binding, God no longer speaks with him. Sarah 

dies. Isaac no longer speaks with him. In describing Abraham and Isaac en route to 

Mount Moriah, the Bible uses the term yachdav, (Genesis 22:6) translated as ‘together’. 

But yachdav denotes more than togetherness. Yachdav is etymologically derived 

from the term echad, meaning ‘one,’ which points to the complete unity of Abraham 

and Isaac and not just their juxtaposition (as would be the case with the word immo,

10 MAKOM Michael Francus 

Phinehas, Abraham, and the Ethics of Imagination 11 

“with him”). Before the Binding they are tied to each other tightly. Afterwards, Abraham 

departs alone, and Abraham’s burial is the next time that they appear together: 

their former bond is lost. Such consequences of the Binding should not leave the 

reader overcome with the joys of fulfilled duty to God; rather, they should inspire 

ambivalence towards that duty, which brings the pinnacle of faith and catastrophe. 

Abraham’s mixed results demand explanation, as absolute duty to God 

ought not disappoint, and its fulfillment should bring only good and happiness. In 

what way did Abraham go wrong? He ran up against the limits of faith. The Binding 

was a test (“After these things…God tested Abraham.” [Genesis 22:1]) but not 

one of faith: it tested that which goes beyond faith, as it presented a case of a communication 

misaligned with the Ethical. And Abraham failed. While most of the 

journey to God consisted of faith (in accepting His communications), the next step 

of the journey towards God required more, and here Abraham fell short. Abraham’s 

reward was that of faith, and only faith. God blessed his posterity, as faith is a critical 

part of maintaining any people who will journey toward God. But the focus was not 

on Abraham himself—unlike with Phinehas, whose covenant of peace established a 

personal relationship between him and God. Abraham did not achieve a complete relationship 

with the Ethical. After the Binding, Abraham lived estranged from God— 

never again did they speak, for he could go no further. Abraham was endlessly faithful, 

the ideal “father of faith” as Kierkegaard labels him. 5 But this ideal is dissatisfying; 

there is a need for moving beyond faith, for finding something more, as Phinehas did. 

The Nameless More 

Kierkegaard presents the problem of faith as a paradox, which counterposes 

God and the Ethical. In doing so, he portrays Abraham as the greatest man, the faithful 

par excellence, but at the cost of placing duty to God in opposition to the Ethical, 

and thereby surrendering the very definition of God as omnibenevolent. Hence, 

Kierkegaard’s view is itself problematic despite its analysis of Abraham, which is correct 

in seeing Abraham as the faithful man par excellence. Where, then, does he err? 

He errs in taking faith as the highest aim of humanity. Beyond faith lies something 

more, something that has not been named and could not be named, something that 

partakes in the will of God itself. 

Abraham neglected this nameless more for the sake of the divine communication. 

He heard God tell him to sacrifice Isaac and obliged, rather than following the 

Ethical, which would have told him to resist. In this case, the communication did not 

align with the truly ethical, and hence Abraham was tested. The Ethical demanded a 

refusal to sacrifice Isaac, but Abraham could not bring himself to disobey the communication 

from God. Thus, through his unconditional acquiescence to faith (obeying 

the divine communication), Abraham failed, and only attained the reward of 

faith. He came farther than all before him by achieving unconditional faith, which is 

the basis of ethical living, but he could go no further. 

Closing Thoughts 

The zealotry of Phinehas points to a new understanding of Jewish ethics. 

Unlike Kierkegaard, who relies on Abraham to construct faith as the paradox of God 

contra the ethical, I reject any such paradox. My system retains the omnibenevolence 

of God and acknowledges the paucity of human knowledge. For all of our advancement, 

we can never know God’s will directly, and thus do not have direct access to 

the truly Ethical. To survive, human beings have established ethical systems upon 

the divine communications that God has sent them throughout history. These communications 

approximate the truly Ethical, and as such enable us to confront our 

paucity of knowledge. The divine communication functionally removes the terrors 

of ethical existence by providing a set of rules that counteract our epistemological 

shortcomings. In doing so, it poses the first challenge to humans: faith. Faith is the 

foundation of ethical existence, and requires living in accordance with the rules set 

forth by the divine communication—no meager task, and one that even biblical 

characters routinely fail. As Kierkegaard argued, Abraham was the father of faith, 

who did the spadework by not deviating from God’s communication. As the father 

of faith, he merited the fatherhood of the Children of Israel, God’s nation, and was 

ethically superior to the sinners of his time and of later times. Nevertheless, in addition 

to faith there is a second challenge, which Abraham failed. God may test us by 

conveying a communication that is misaligned with the truly ethical and therefore 

unethical. In these cases one must stand up to God’s communication, and reject the 

apparent ethics set forth by the communication in order to align one’s actions with 

the truly Ethical. There is no challenge like it. No knowledge and no reasoning can 

aid us. One must stand in front of God’s law and say, “It must be otherwise!” as 

Phinehas did, with no basis but imagination. In this case, faith is wrong, albeit tempting 

for its security. The proper alternative, the truly Ethical course of action, must be 

to challenge God’s communication in order to approach God’s will itself. If incorrect, 

one amounts to no more than Zimri. If correct, one attains an eternal covenant with 

God, a covenant that goes beyond faith. There is no name for such a relationship with 

God, and it is not the type of relationship that one can fully understand or rationally 

achieve from first principles. Yet it places a human being on the highest plane of existence 

and, as an embrace of the Ethical, is a form of unity with God. 

Notes 

1 “Ye shall not do after all the things that we do here this day, every man whatsoever is right 

in his own eyes.” 

2 Kierkegaard, Soren. Fear and Trembling. ed. C. Stephen Evans and Sylvia Walsh. (Cambridge: 

Cambridge UP, 2006) 

3 Ibid, page 62 


5 Ibid, page 15

The Universality of Suffering: 

A Theological Commentary on Chagall’s White 

Crucifixion 


Scholars have consistently understood Chagall’s White Crucifixion as intended 

for either a Jewish or Christian audience. These readings, while astute and 

subtle in some senses, are incomplete as long as they do not recognize the painting’s 

universality. In this piece, I maintain that this painting’s subject is universal human 

suffering. Chagall elevates this suffering to an almost religious status by demythologizing 

traditional Jewish and Christian theological imagery and simultaneously mythologizing 

human suffering. To argue this more clearly, I have divided this essay into 

three parts. In the first, I shall briefly introduce the notion of crucifixion in religious 

art and introduce my approach to the painting. My approach will be focused on 

uncovering Chagall’s theological intention in portraying Jesus in a somewhat Jewish 

manner. In the second part, I shall look at the various approaches that critics have 

taken to the painting. In general, these seem to be focused either on an exclusively 

Jewish or exclusively Christian message. I shall try and show, however, that the painting’s 

message is neither one nor the other, but rather an appeal to universals, most 

specifically, universal human suffering. In my third section, I shall try and explore 

how the use of composite Christian and Jewish imagery undermines generic religious 

claims on ‘redemption’, insofar as redemption refers to freedom from suffering. 

I. Artistic Crucifixions as a hermeneutical tool 

Over the course of the twentieth century, theological movements and symbols 

were radically transformed. Against a backdrop of cultural globalization and on 

a scale never before seen, seminal historic events and monumental developments in 

technology accelerated the already extant movements of skepticism and secularism. 

Accordingly, the art of the twentieth century both reflected and struggled with these 

historical conditions. On a vast scale, people began to use the image of the crucifix 

outside of exclusively religious settings. Even within religious settings, this image 

was used innovatively. Furthermore, innovative religious use, particularly after the 

Holocaust, was not confined to Christians: the crucifix was innovatively portrayed 

by and for Jews as well. Chagall’s White Crucifixion is a particularly potent example 

of this phenomenon. 

Post-Enlightenment, religious art is often seen to be a form of hermeneutics 

and a means of transferal of experience from a religious artistic interpreter to a religious 

audience. This is the approach of Stephen Breck Reid, a theologian at Baylor 

University, who has written extensively about the place of art in worship. He has 

The Universality of Suffering 

White Crucifixion by Marc Chagall, Courtesy of the Art Institute of Chicago 

argued that religious art should be viewed as a form of exegesis. In the textual sense, 

“exegesis was the recapitulation of experience,” a means of deepening the connection 

between the worshiper and the intention of the religious text. When the artist 

embodies the role of the exegete, the viewer is provided with a visual portrait of the 

exegete-artist’s own religious experience. Thus, in Reid’s view, when studying any 

painting that deals with explicitly religious themes, the objective or intention of such 

exegete-artists becomes an important subject of discussion. 1 This approach is one 

that I find convincing, and I shall therefore be focusing on what Chagall’s intentions 

were when he portrayed Jesus in White Crucifixion. I mention this here in order to 

13

14 MAKOM Michal Goldschmidt 


15 

distinguish my approach and this article from those that merely meditate upon the 

viewer’s religious reaction to Chagall’s crucifixion paintings. Although interesting, 

they do not provide a key to unlocking the intention of the artist, and therefore they 

belong to a different discussion. 

II. Interpretations of the White Crucifixion’s iconography 

The focal point of the White Crucifixion is a crucifixion image: bathed in 

a shaft of white light, Jesus and the cross fill the center of painting. While scholars 

debate the meaning of Chagall’s rendition of this central image, they tend to read it 

either as exclusively Jewish or exclusively Christian. These approaches, while subtle 

and insightful, miss something if they fail to recognize the universality of Chagall’s 

message. 

Most scholars address the same basic problem in their treatment of this 

image: the significance of this blatantly Jewish depiction of Jesus. This is a complex 

matter. Traditionally, crucifixion images depict Jesus as either drawing his last breath 

and pleading with God to save him or having just passed from the world—a moment 

which the Gospels describe as pivotal in world history. 2 Indeed, in accord with this 

tradition Chagall’s Jesus has already drawn his last breath and is dead upon the cross. 

Also common in crucifixion images, blood drips from miniature holes in this Jesus’ 

hands and feet. Chagall’s depiction of Jesus does, however, differ importantly from 

the Jesus crucified in the Gospels and thus raises contentious theological problems. 

Jesus is not surrounded by the figures one would typically anticipate—his mother 

Mary, St. John the Baptist, or Mary Magdalene. Also, Chagall rather blatantly indicates 

that this Jesus is Jewish: rather than the crown of thorns he normally wears in 

such images, Jesus dons a cloth head covering similar to the Jewish kippah. Similarly, 

his loincloth is fringed and its two black stripes closely resemble a tallit, the Jewish 

prayer shawl often worn in worship. 

To answer the interpretive question posed by Jesus’ blatant Jewishness, 

many have tried to argue that Chagall’s Jesus is nothing but one of the many other 

suffering Jews that surround him. For Matthew Baigell, the Jesus of the White Crucifixion 

is not “portrayed….as the Christian Son of God, but as a Jew who suffers and 

whose suffering does not redeem the world, because the suffering continues after His 

crucifixion.” 3 Mark Godfrey concurs, but also adds to the impression of a helpless, 

suffering Jew. He believes that Chagall is asserting that Jesus is neither redemptive 

nor the ultimate atonement of sin for humanity. 4 On these readings, Jesus’ Jewishness 

challenges Christian doctrine and, therefore, the painting’s meaning is mostly 

relevant to Christians. 

Championing another approach, Ziva Amishai-Maisels has argued that 

Chagall’s portrayal of a Jewish Jesus surrounded by suffering Jews should be understood 

in a more accusatory vein. For her, Chagall’s “message is that in killing Jews or 

other innocent victims, Christians were not only betraying Christ’s ideas, but kill- 

ing Christ himself.” 5 On this view, Chagall chooses Christian imagery in order to 

communicate specifically to Christians. He adopts Christian pictorial language, a 

language inherently alien to him, in order to enhance the potency of his criticism 

against the perpetrators of the crusades of the past and the pogroms of his present. 6 

This view offers an understanding of the painting only relevant to Christians and 

Jews. 

Understandings of this painting as evincing an anti-Christian message—a 

denial of Christ’s divinity or as an accusation against Christians—suggest that this 

painting is directed towards Christians. There is, however, evidence to suggest that 

this is not the artist’s intention. In the early 20 th Century, many academics were 

exploring the ramifications of Jesus’ Judaism on the message of the New Testament. 

7 With this intellectual context in mind, Chagall’s Jewish Jesus is less likely 

an explicit challenge to Christian doctrine than an extension of this investigation. 

Chagall, however, does not limit the image and possibilities of a Jewish Jesus to the 

realm of New Testament interpretation—as those primarily Christian scholars were 

apt to do. Rather, he seems to be emphasizing the ramifications Jesus’ Jewishness 

upon Jewish theology and identity instead. Thus, already, understandings of White 

Crucifixion as directed towards an exclusively Christian audience become questionable. 

There is also biographical evidence that suggests that Chagall did not mean for 

his painting’s audience to be Christian and Jewish. He himself said that 

For me, Christ has always symbolized the true type of martyr. That is 

how I understood him in 1908 when I used this figure for the first time. 

I was under the influence of the pogroms. Then I painted and drew 

him in pictures about ghettos surrounded by Jewish troubles, by Jewish 

mothers, running terrified and holding little children in their arms. 8 

It is, even, tempting to use this explicit equivalence between the suffering of the Jews 

in the organized pogroms and a crucified Jesus to argue for a solely Jewish exposition 

of Jesus and move to another extreme in interpreting this painting. One tempted in 

this way should note, however, that Chagall does not say that Jesus is the true Jewish 

martyr, but rather a true martyr in a more general sense. 

In fact, there is much to suggest this more universal meaning of Chagall’s 

crucifixion image. Chaim Potok’s book, My Name is Asher Lev, was partly based upon 

and inspired by Chagall’s life. In it, a Jewish artist paints his familial pain in the form 

of a crucifixion because “there was no aesthetic mould in his own religious tradition 

into which he could pour a painting of ultimate anger and torment.” 9 Upon introducing 

Asher Lev to crucifixion images, Asher’s first teacher, who is a Jew himself 

and aware of the religious sensitivities of his Hasidic student, tells him, “I am not 

telling you to paint crucifixions. I am telling you that you must understand what a 

crucifixion is in art if you want to be a great artist. The crucifixion must be available 

to you as a form.” 10 Here, Potok correctly emphasizes the importance of the role that



17 

the crucifixion as a form has played in the canon of Western Art. 11 Additionally, the 

prominent image of Jesus on the Cross became the archetypal pictorial expression of 

suffering, martyrdom, and godliness. Indeed, in his autobiography, Chagall briefly 

touched on the artistic inspiration he sometimes found when studying traditional 

Christian iconography and religious images. He said that he “recognized the quality 

of some great creations of icon tradition – for example, the works of Andrei Rublev 

[a famous Russian Orthodox iconographer]” as ubiquitous tropes for expressing human 

situations. 12 R. Rosen said it well when he said of the White Crucifixion, “Some 

symbols transcend particular traditions and strike a universal human chord.” 13 

Perhaps the best argument for this more universal interpretation of the 

White Crucifixion’s central image comes from the painting itself. The tormented figures 

that surround Jesus’ crucifixion appeal to the compassion of all viewers. These 

figures are evocative and unusual in a crucifixion image. Some, for instance, appear 

to be running out of the painting and towards its viewers; this brings their suffering 

closer and increases emotional impact. Crucially, and most idiosyncratically, none of 

the many figures on the periphery of the canvas look at Jesus and none are of Jesus’ 

historical era. They are frantically animated and dash from their crises as Jesus lies 

tranquilly dead on the cross in first-century Palestine. Thus, the painting is not showing 

any specific historical event, but simultaneously representing many events over 

many centuries. Furthermore, this composite nature seems to deliberately reference 

Eastern ikon painting, and thus the painting participates in narrative and formal 

methods from both Eastern and Western artistic traditions and histories. 14 Through 

its historical, narrative, and formal diversity the painting is made cross communal. 

On the left, reflecting the pogroms Chagall witnessed as a child in Vitebsk, 

the Russians, holding their red flags, plunder a shtetl. 15 On the right, a large Westernlooking 

synagogue is set aflame under a German flag, which probably mirrors the destruction 

of the synagogues in Munich and Nuremberg a few months before Chagall 

finished the painting. Originally, the flag next to the German displayed a swastika, as 

did the armband of the man destroying the synagogue. Representing the many signs 

and symbols that Jews were forced to don under Nazi rule, the sign on the man in 

the front left-hand corner who is amongst the other figures fleeing their synagogue 

also used to read “Ich bin Jude” (I am a Jew). However, Chagall painted over these 

details because, as he told Franz Meyer, he found that the distress and persecution in 

the painting made a statement that was more “literal” than he had intended. 16 For 

this reason, Chagall shifted the painting’s focus from a historical depiction of Nazi 

and Soviet pursuit of the Jews to a more general rendering of Jewish hardship and 

persecution. Just as Chagall included some Christian icons in other artworks for their 

emotional power and impactful connotations, his erasure of the more exhaustive 

emblems of Nazi persecution are downplayed in the hope that the viewer may look 

beyond the specifics of Kristallnacht towards the greater motif: man’s inhumanity to 

his fellow man. The universality of Chagall’s subject and the diversity of his symbol- 

ism imply a universality of audience. 

III. Chagall’s demythologizing of traditional Judeo-Christian imagery 

Based on a close reading of the theological symbols contained in this painting, 

and against previous scholarship, I think that White Crucifixion bespeaks the 

role of suffering in shaping the man-God relationship. Chagall consistently undermines 

both Christian and Jewish religious imagery while elevating his own imagery 

of universal suffering to an almost religious status. If anything has definitively altered 

the man-God relationship—changing man’s understanding of and relationship to 

God—it was not Jesus’ light leaving the world as Christian doctrine holds, but rather 

the intense pursuit of man by man that characterized the 20 th century. Neither theology 

can account for the universal suffering of mankind. This suffering must be approached 

humbly, respectfully, almost religiously. 

Just like the crucifix that they flank, the visions of Jewish maltreatment on 

either side of Jesus contain symbols that can be interpreted as both Christian and 

Jewish in meaning. On one side of Jesus, a living goat sits alone and watches the 

blazing shtetl. In the Hebrew Bible, the innocent scapegoat led off into the wilderness—to 

Azazel— is central to the ritual of Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. 17 

In the Christian tradition, Jesus is often seen as the final scapegoat. Juxtaposing these 

symbols with the oppression of Russian Jewry underlines the tragedy of the torture 

of innocents, both then and now. On Jesus’ other side, the parochet—the curtain that 

covers the ark containing Torah scrolls—burns in a synagogue. These curtains are often 

decorated and embellished; much care goes into the upkeep of the scrolls and the 

layers that protect them. For a Jewish viewer, the sight of this curtain aflame would 

be distressing in and of itself. Furthermore, in Midrashic literature, the parochet is 

thought of as analogous to the curtain in the Temple in Jerusalem at the entrance to 

the Holy of Holies. As I mentioned before, in the Christian tradition, “the curtain 

of the Temple was torn in two” (Luke. 23:45) after Jesus drew his last breath. Theologically, 

this has been taken to mean that a new relationship between man and God 

began when Jesus drew his last breath. Chagall’s inclusion of this symbol alongside 

Jesus on the cross articulates a belief that more than the advent of a messiah, indeed 

more than anything else, the endless cycles of suffering (for the events in the picture 

span millennia) have shaped the relationship between God and humanity. 

This challenge to traditional heavenly paradigms is reinforced by the figures 

that float above Jesus. Unlike many Christian crucifixion images depicting an angelic 

presence above Christ, these figures do not triumphantly proclaim the occurrences 

beneath them as opening a new age. 18 One scholar has identified these figures as the 

“biblical patriarchs and a matriarch” and indeed, this is consonant with many Jewish 

tales. 19 For instance, in Jeremiah XXXI, Rachel weeps for the torment of her children, 

the people Israel, and through the merit of her tears the Lord promises to return 

them to their homeland. 20 Additionally, in the fifth century Lamentations Rabbah,



19 

Petihta XXIV, the patriarchs are described as exhibiting an unparalleled mourning 

for the destruction of the First Temple. Their weeping is the only true, authentic sorrow 

and it can hasten divine redemption. But in Chagall’s rendition, the patriarchs 

and matriarch are mournful onlookers to both Jesus’ and twentieth-century Jewish 

problems; they too experience pain and have been reduced to something like beggars. 

21 In the painting, the patriarchs and matriarchs are not angelic powers who can 

intervene with God on behalf of their people, for they too they too are subject to the 

Jewish people’s fate, they too suffer. This illustration is a far cry from the glory of their 

biblical days and their revered place in the balance of Jewish and Christian literature. 

In White Crucifixion, Chagall strips still other figures and motifs from Jewish 

texts and liturgy of their established symbolic efficacy. On the lower right of the 

canvas, a figure in green takes great strides to escape the chaos and destruction of the 

surrounding scene. Chagall “ironically described the prophet Elijah as masquerading 

as a Wandering Jew, although Elijah’s arrival traditionally signals the coming of the 

Messiah and the end of the Jewish exile.” 22 Not only is this wandering Elijah fleeing 

rather than redeeming, but also his flight cuts directly through the smoke radiating 

from the burning Torah scroll in the corner. He does not even stop to salvage the 

remains of the Holy Scripture. Elijah cannot save the lives of the Jews here: the Torah 

cannot save Elijah either. 

The path of smoke through which Elijah flees ends in a mysterious white 

ladder and it too is a religious reference stripped of its traditional theological meaning. 

Crucially, this ladder does not reach the ground and it does not reach Jesus on 

the cross. Thus, on the one hand, it cannot be the ladder used to place Jesus on the 

crucifix. It cannot save him from this fate as it does not reach the sturdy ground 

below. On the other hand, it cannot be the ladder of Jacob’s dream because it doesn’t 

reach the heavens. 23 For this reason, this ladder cannot serve as an angelic causeway 

and, therefore, can neither symbolize a hopeful connection between divine heaven 

and human earth nor the Biblical covenant. It seems that Chagall, in referencing established 

symbols but denying them their established meaning, is denying the hopeful 

and covenantal theology that is their context and grounding. 

As if to involve the audience in the incidents of the painting, a Jewish mother 

and child run towards the viewer. They bear a strong resemblance to many images 

of the Virgin and Child but they are desolate and on the run. In place of a crown, the 

mother wears a dirty Jewish headscarf and her robe is murky black instead of clear 

blue. Again, Chagall refers to images established by religion as symbols of hopeful 

doctrine and replaces their hopefulness with desolation and despair. This is the truth 

that is revealed with universal human suffering. 

This demythologization of traditional Christian and Jewish figures is in 

keeping with the general disillusionment with ideas of redemption portrayed in 

White Crucifixion. The painting in its entirety seems to undermine the theological 

authority claimed by both Judaism and Christianity. Both offer sophisticated and 

complex imagery that attempt to account for the existence of global afflictions. Here, 

though, these symbols are, themselves, being persecuted. Elijah has returned, but he 

has been driven out again. Jesus has died for deliverance from sin, and yet even those 

who follow him are perpetrators of sin. Rachel cries for her people, but unlike in Jeremiah, 

God does not return her children to Israel. Rather, her descendants aimlessly 

scramble away from one tragedy to another. 

This reading is further reinforced by the image of the Jews on the small 

boat on the left of the painting. They are lucky insofar as they have managed to 

escape the pogrom of their village with their lives, but they are losing their paddle 

and gesture aimlessly with their arms in frustration at their inability to avoid a new 

disaster so immediately after last. The only potentially hopeful element of the boat’s 

voyage is its foray into the shaft of heavenly light that illuminates the passion of 

Christ. However, the ray of light itself may not be so optimistic. As Aaron Rosen 

aptly pointed out, “Though some critics glimpse a sign of deliverance in the beam 

of light that bisects the canvas, what it ultimately illuminated is not so much the 

promise of a redemption as the reality of suffering.” 24 Especially in the context of 

the unfulfilled salvation symbols of the White Crucifixion, this reading of the light 

in the painting seems accurate. Although the light brightens the bleak, drained grey 

that dominates the canvas, the white is glossy but has the solemn overtones associated 

with the white of a Jewish burial shroud. 

Another image that might seem optimistic and the only major image yet to 

be discussed in this article is the candelabrum at Jesus’ feet. This candelabrum gives 

off its own heavenly light and holds the only fire in the painting that does not destroy. 

Indeed, it produces a halo of light that mirrors the one surrounding Jesus’ head. 

Considering the plethora of Jewish symbols in the painting, it is tempting to describe 

the candelabrum as a Jewish menorah—a candelabrum lit on Hanukkah, the Festival 

of Lights, in order to commemorate the Jewish victory over the Romans who were 

trying to outlaw the Jewish religion. However, the six-branched candelabrum in the 

painting is not an authentic eight-winged menorah. Furthermore, to understand this 

image, one must note that yahrzeit candles are used in Judaism as a form of remembrance 

for the dead. 25 Chagall’s candelabrum is not identical to a yahrzeit candle or to 

a menorah, but it alludes to both. By fusing the yahrzeit-menorah against a backdrop 

of suffering, the painting seems to assert that the perennial nature of Jewish victimization 

is inescapable. The menorah cannot be a true menorah because the story of 

Hannukah is still being repeated: the fight for freedom of religious identity has not 

been won—if it ever can be. Moreover, the Jews don’t seem to be in a position to fight 

their oppressors. There is no potential for battle here and there are no Hasmoneans 

forming an army. There is only fleeing and mourning. 

The demythologizing of many Jewish and Christian religious archetypes 

is juxtaposed with the mythologizing of the relentlessness of human anguish. This 

torment acts as the sacred exemplar that binds the disparate characters and images



21 

in the painting both to each other and to the viewer. Perhaps this is the reason for 

the ambiguous identity of Jesus, who is both Christian and Jewish at the same time. 

A fiddle, used to represent Jews in Yiddish plays like those of Sholom Aleichem, lies 

abandoned and unplayed. As long as humanity cannot recognize its interconnectedness 

and contemplate the tragedy of all persecution, there cannot be the hope of 

music nor can there be a unifying artistic culture for the West. The rise of the Nazi 

party in the West confused Chagall: “how could a civilization whose eyes had been 

schooled by the brushstrokes of Durer, Cranach, and Holbein fail to see the humanity 

of their victims? …For Chagall, the moral failures of the Holocaust were, at the 

same time, artistic failures.” 26 Whilst incessant maltreatment continues, all one can 

do is commemorate the valor of innocent victims. The White Crucifixion laments the 

hopeless and ubiquitous suffering of humanity that religion cannot solve. The painting 

itself is nothing more than a tormented onlooker. 

Notes 

1 Stephen Breck Reid, “The Art of Marc Chagall: An Interpretation of Scripture,” in Art 

as Religious Studies, ed. Doug Adams and Diane Apostolos-Cappadona, 70-80 (New York: 

Crossroad, 1987), page 71. 

2 For example, see Mark 15:38, which describes the Temple curtain, of its own accord, tearing 

into two pieces at the moment of crucifixion. 

3 Matthew Baigell, “Jewish artists in New York: the 1940s,” in Absence/Presence: Critical Essays 

on the Artistic Memory of the Holocaust, ed. Steve Feinstein (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University 

Press, 2005), page 158. 

4 Mark Godfrey, in Melissa Raphael, Judaism and the Visual Image: A Jewish theology of Art 

(London: Continuum, 2009) page 141. Likewise, Franz Meyer believed that ‘Chagall’s Christ 

figure lacks the Christian concept of salvation. For all his holiness he is by no means divine.’ 

F. Meyer in Richard Kidd and Graham Sparkes, God and the Art of Seeing (Oxford: Regent’s 

Park College, 2003), page 55. 

5 Amishai-Maisels in M. Raphael, Judaism, pages 141-2. 

6 Michael Brown also views Chagall’s use of a crucifixion in this way, although he differs 

somewhat from Amishai-Maisels when he argues for a “heavily ironic” essence to the painting 

(Michael Brown in M. Raphael, Judaism, page 142). That is, he does not see Chagall as offering 

a religious message at all. The sense of the painting, according to Brown, is accusatory, 

but this is not where Chagall’s focus lies. Instead of accusing Christians of wrongdoing and 

shame them into moral repentance, Chagall is merely pointing out an irony. The Jews now 

embody true Christian values. Roles are reversed. They act like the innocent, persecuted Jesus 

of the gospels. Meanwhile, Christians have adopted the brutal and antagonistic behavior of 

the ancestors of the Jews, the Pharisees. 

7 This issue was largely ignored and/or denied until the 1800s, when scholars such as William 

Wrede and Herman Reimarus began to attempt to construct a picture of Jesus through 

historical, rather than purely theological, methodology. A socio-historical background of First 

Century Judaea, including the nature of Judaism and Jewish identity at the time, thus came 

to play a great role in this effort. 

8 Amishai-Maisels, “Chagall’s White Cricifixion,” Art Institute of Chicago Museum Studies 

(Pergamon Press) 17, no. 2 (1991): 138-53 & 180-81, page 143. 

9 Kidd & Sparkes, God, p. 51. 

10 Chiam Potok, My Name is Asher Lev (New York: Knopf, 1972) page 228. 

11 Historically, an artist’s crucifixion image would be the marker by which his talent could be 

judged. 

12 Marc Chagall in Aaron Rosen, Imagining Jewish Art: Encounters with the Masters in Chagall, 

Guston, and Kitaj (London: Legenda, 2009), page 19. The bracketed comments are mine. 

13 R. Rosen in Kidd & Sparkes, God, page 51 

14 Susan Compton has suggested that the painting eludes traditional Eastern and Western 

religious art categories by this inability of the composite parts to form a coherent narrative 

is intentional and means that “its form is related to that of an Eastern ikon, although the 

artist has dispensed with the separate compartments of an Orthodox ikon and used the grey 

background to unify the disparate scenes. All are dominated by the calm figure on the cross, 

an image from the Western tradition” [Susan Crompton, Chagall (New York: H. N. Abrams, 

1985) p. 214]. Unlike in the Western tradition, wherein large portraits or wall friezes interacted 

with one another, it was common for Eastern friezes or altarpieces to consist of many 

diverse and distinct images from across the Christian religion. As in the White Crucifixion, 

smaller scenes would often surround one larger image, such as Christ or the Virgin Mary. 

Unlike in the White Crucifixion, though, the different images were compartmentalized, 

clearly marking the different scenes as self-contained. Moreover, the figures of suffering on 

either side of Jesus that take the place of the two criminals next to whom Christ was crucified 

in the Gospels show scenes of suffering from both and Eastern and Western Jewry. 

15 There is some debate about whether these figures are the protagonists or saviors of the 

village’s distress. Amishai-Maisels has argued for the Russians as liberators. Even if this were 

the case, they are ineffectual. The village has already been torched and the people have fled or 

been killed. 

16 Chagall in Z. Amishai-Maisels, ‘Chagall’s White Crucifixion’, page 140. Amishai-Maisels 

points out that Chagall had plenty of opportunity to replace these details and did not. Thus, 

she concludes that the erasure was meant to be permanent (ibid., page142). 

17 Leviticus 16:7-10 & 20-23 

18 Also, unlike the angels that Chagall painted in other works, these figures lack wings. 

19 Monica Bohm-Duchen, Chagall (London: Phaidon, 1998), page 231. 

20 Jeremiah 31: 14-16 

21 Bohm-Duchen has suggested in reference to another Chagall painting, Over Vitebsk, 

that the portrayal of floating Jews “can also be explained by a popular Yiddish expression, 

whereby to ‘walk over the city’ alludes to the practice of door-to-door begging indicative of 

the poverty of so many Eastern European Jews at the time.” I would like to extend this to the 

figures here. M. Bohm-Duchen, Chagall, page 102. 

22 Ziva Amichai-Maisels, Depiction and Interpretation: the Influence of the Holocaust in the 

Visual Arts (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1991), page 21. 

23 Chagall did use Jacob’s ladder as a symbol in some of his other painting and this ladder 

does bear some resemblance to the ladder of his Jacob’s Ladder—both these ladders end in a 

shaft of light presumably originating from Heaven. Cf. Genesis 28:10-21. 

24 A. Rosen, Imagining, page 28. 

25 During the traditional week of mourning following the death of a family member, yahrzeit

22 MAKOM 


candles are lit. Afterwards, on the anniversary of the death, the candle is lit again for 24 

hours as a form of remembrance. 

26 Rosen, Imagining p. 40. 


Jon Catlin 

According to established usage in the Oxford English Dictionary the term 

“Holocaust” refers to “the mass murder of Jews under the German Nazi regime during 

the period 1941–45.” 1 Only in the second sentence of this definition do we see 

mention of others persecuted: “More than 6 million European Jews, as well as members 

of other persecuted groups, such as gypsies and homosexuals, were murdered at 

concentration camps such as Auschwitz.” The term comes from the Greek holokaustos, 

meaning “burnt whole,” and has been used since the Middle Ages to refer to massacres. 

2 Today, the term “Holocaust” refers almost exclusively to the extermination of 

the Jewish people in Europe, and its relationship to the Hebrew term olah, meaning 

“burnt offering,” gives the Holocaust a particular biblical significance to Jews. 

But what we now think of as the Holocaust was not always considered a 

specifically Jewish catastrophe. Cultural reception of catastrophic events changes over 

time. Only in the last thirty-five years has the Holocaust taken on the Jewish identity 

it has today in American culture––and even that is questioned. We have long known 

that many non-Jews perished in the Holocaust and related events, but prominent 

Jewish scholars such as Yad Vashem’s director, Yehuda Bauer maintain that the term 

“Holocaust” should apply only to Jews because of the uniquely genocidal component 

of the Holocaust for Jews. 3 My task here is to bring into question both traditional 

Jewish accounts of the Holocaust and non-Jewish so-called “revisionist” accounts in 

hopes of addressing the question, “What is the value of the concept of a Jewish Holocaust?” 

Two premises will guide my argument: 1) Holocaust narratives should be 

judged on their historical accuracy and their moral usefulness and 2) narratives with 

more varied perspectives and greater moral complexity are more morally salutary. 

According to Peter Novick in his exhaustive study The Holocaust in American 

Life, during the years following World War II even survivors of the death camps 

referred to their time in the camps as simply “the war” or “the Nazi atrocities”— 

collectivizations in the historical passive voice. 4 For example, the words “Jew” and 

“Jewish” do not appear in Edward R. Murrow’s or General Dwight D. Eisenhower’s 

accounts of the Allied liberation of Buchenwald from April 1945. 5 Tragically, this 

was because so many Jewish prisoners had perished that only about one fifth of prisoners 

liberated by the Americans at Buchenwald and Dachau were Jews. 6 The May 

7, 1945 issue of Life magazine that first brought Margaret Bourke-White’s widely 

reproduced photographic evidence of the Holocaust to the American public refers 

to the crimes not as specifically anti-Semitic, but simply as “[a]trocities… of the 

German concentration camps.” 7 Most victims photographed at the liberation of Buchenwald 

were called “displaced persons” (or DPs), “prisoners of many nationalities,” 

“slave laborers,” or “political prisoners.” The word “holocaust” (uncapitalized) only

24 MAKOM Jon Catlin 


25 

appeared in a caption referring to an image of a town that was literally burned. The 

next coverage of the Holocaust in Time came months later, in a September 11, 1945 

article titled “Murder, Inc.” which stated that the Majdanek camp killed “Poles, Jews, 

political prisoners, and war prisoners.” Describing the identity documents of those 

who perished, the article notes the “papers of Frenchmen, Russians, Greeks, Czechs, 

Jews, Italians, Belo-Russians, Serbs, Poles.” News of the Nazi atrocities quickly spread 

across America, but was overshadowed by other wartime issues like FDR’s death and 

Hitler’s suicide. 8 

According to Novick, “Between the end of the war and the 1960s … the 

Holocaust made scarcely any appearance in American public discourse, and hardly 

more in Jewish public discourse.” 9 Few books or movies dealt with the Holocaust and 

those that did had small audiences, with a few exceptions. 10 Nathan Glazer’s 1957 

book American Judaism reported that the Holocaust “had remarkably slight effects 

on the inner life of American Jewry.” 11 Similarly, a 1947 study of American-Jewish 

sentiment about the Holocaust by a University of Chicago sociology student determined 

that “the murder of Europe’s Jews has not strongly affected the basic pattern of 

thought and feeling of Jews in the United States.” 12 This strange indifference was due 

largely to a feeling of shame among survivors wanting to move on with their lives, but 

it also reflected a clear downplaying of the Holocaust by Jewish leaders in America. 

Novick writes, “Whereas nowadays the status of victim has come to be prized, in 

the forties and fifties it evoked at best the sort of pity mixed with contempt.” 13 Most 

Holocaust survivors wanted to abandon and, for lack of a better word, repress their 

traumatic experiences so that they could live normal lives in an extremely conformist 

postwar America. John Slawson, the chief executive of the American Jewish Committee 

said in 1944: 

We must normalize the image of the Jew… [What is implied] is neither 

segregation nor assimilation, but an adjustment to the American scene by 

means of a cultural integration… retention of positive and useful traits 

and the gradual sloughing off of useless and outworn characteristics in 

favor of desirable American characteristics. 14 

In the minds of prominent Jewish leaders, the best way to minimize anti-Semitism 

was to move on from vestiges of the experience of European Jews in the Holocaust. 

It is for this reason that organizations like the American Jewish Committee and the 

American Jewish Congress consistently voted in 1946, 1947, and 1948 against building 

a Holocaust memorial in New York City. 15 In the immediate postwar years, Jews 

tended to downplay and even cover up their ties to the Holocaust. 

In the late fifties, about twenty years before the Holocaust reached its peak 

attention, the first wave of survivor literature surfaced in the West. In the preface to 

the new translation of his now-iconic book Night, Elie Wiesel indicates that every 

major publisher refused his manuscript until it was published in French in 1958 

and translated into English in 1960. 16 Wiesel explains the difficulty with publishing 

his work: “Despite overwhelmingly favorable reviews, the book sold poorly. The 

subject was considered morbid and it interested no one.” 17 Up until the mid-fifties, 

Wiesel explained, if a rabbi ever mentioned the Holocaust in a sermon, “there were 

always people ready to complain that it was senseless to ‘burden our children with 

the tragedies of the Jewish past.’” 

The distinctively Jewish character of the Holocaust was first popularized 

in America by The Diary of a Young Girl 18 , the diary of Anne Frank, which was published 

in Dutch in 1947 after being rejected by dozens of publishers. 19 When it was 

translated into English in 1952, it quickly became a bestseller. The play adaption of 

the book won the Pulitzer Prize in 1955 and became a popular film in 1959. Anne 

Frank, who one scholar called “Hitler’s most famous victim,” became a recognizable 

image of the Holocaust’s immense costs for Jews and a recognizable name in 

American culture. 20 

However, it wasn’t until the late seventies that the Holocaust as we understand 

it gained widespread awareness among the American public. Peter Novick 

writes, 

By the 1970s and 1980s the Holocaust had become a shocking, massive, 

and distinctive thing: clearly marked off, qualitatively and quantitatively, 

from other Nazi atrocities and from previous Jewish persecutions, singular 

in its scope, its symbolism, and its world-historical significance. 21 

With this transformation came Jimmy Carter’s formation of the President’s Commission 

on the Holocaust in 1978, the organization that ultimately founded the United 

States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D.C. That same year, the NBC 

mini-series Holocaust reached an audience of 120 million Americans and has been 

credited with establishing the term “Holocaust” in American culture. 22 According to 

the United States Holocaust Museum’s historian, “these highly public events of 1978 

signaled that the Holocaust had moved not only from the periphery to the center of 

American Jewish consciousness, but to the center of national consciousness as well.” 23 

By this time, the stories of Anne Frank and Elie Wiesel were read with popular acclaim 

in America and became a staple of high school English classrooms. These narratives 

cemented the Holocaust’s unwavering identity as a Jewish catastrophe, from 

which the morally unambiguous distinction between Jewish victims and German 

perpetrators was established. So was born the “never forget” dictum that characterizes 

the worldwide imperative for Holocaust education today. 

As the notion of the Jewish Holocaust grew more central to American Jewry 

and the general American perspective on World War II, two reactions to this history 

emerged. Certain authors came to the fore in elaborating and reinforcing this narrative 

of the Jewish Holocaust, while others sought to expand the term’s scope or even 

reject the relevance of the Jewishness of the Nazi atrocities—of a Jewish Holocaust.



27 

The work of Elie Wiesel, clearly in the former camp, stands out as particularly 

worthy of discussion due to its wide readership, especially among young audiences. 

Cultural historian Oren Baruch Stier accuses Wiesel of giving the Holocaust a 

“sacred core” and turning it into a “sacred mystery held ‘over there’ behind a carefully 

circumscribed fence that, presumably, protects it from abuse at the hands of all who 

would violate its memory and its symbols.” 24 Wiesel’s account of the Holocaust is 

perplexing; he dismisses scientific or historical explanations of the event as insufficient 

in light of what he experienced in Auschwitz as a metaphysical evil that will 

forever remain unspeakable. 25 Throughout his literary corpus, Wiesel focuses almost 

exclusively on Jews in the Holocaust and takes a highly religious perspective. While 

he does not deny or trivialize the non-Jewish suffering at the hands of the Nazis, 

he gives voice only to a religious, Jewish perspective on the Holocaust. However 

important this perspective is for some, his focus does in effect narrow the potential 

audience and, one might argue, over-simplify the events’ moral message. A non- 

Jewish or non-religious reader is not likely to be able to enter fully into the logic of 

Wiesel’s perspective and obtain from his book the crucially important sense of ethical 

responsibility that must go along with a telling of the Holocaust. The narrowing of 

the audience—by appealing to rather particular beliefs and worldviews—narrows 

the moral message and thus the usefulness of the book. Thus the elaboration of the 

Holocaust in Jewish terms, if read to the exclusion of other sources, might miss nuance 

and perspective crucial for engendering the kind of ethical responsibility that 

the Holocaust requires of all. 26 

Peter Novick explains this gradual simplification of historical events into 

black and white categories using Maurice Halbwachs concept of “collective memory,” 

in which cultural narratives tend to replace historical narratives. Novick writes, 

Collective memory is in a crucial sense ahistorical, even anti-historical. 

To understand something historically is to be aware of its complexity, 

to have sufficient detachment to see it from multiple perspectives, 

to accept the ambiguities, including moral ambiguities, 

of protagonists’ motives and behavior. Collective memory simplifies; 

sees events from a single, committed perspective; is impatient 

with ambiguities of any kind; reduces events to mythic archetypes. 27 

This description of “collective memory” characterizes the morally predetermined first 

wave of Holocaust narratives which told the Holocaust story from an exclusively 

Jewish perspective. In response to this was a similarly strong secondary wave of what 

Jewish scholar D.G. Myers called “revisionist accounts”— narratives critiquing both 

the particularly Jewish Holocaust and the black-and-white distinction between Jewish 

victims and evil German perpetrators. For example, Philip Roth’s Ghost Writer 

gives a fictional account of Anne Frank surviving to become a creative writing student 

in America, dispelling the “aura of sanctity” around the Jewish victim. 28 William 

Styron’s 1979 novel Sophie’s Choice best embodies this second wave of Holocaust 

literature and it is this text that I will evaluate here. 

Sophie’s Choice won the US National Book Award for Fiction in 1980 and 

was made into an Academy Award-winning film by the same name in 1982. It tells 

the story of Sophie Zawistowski, a Polish-Catholic woman who, by a chance turn of 

events, was taken to Auschwitz as a political prisoner with her two children. Being a 

non-Jewish Pole, she was awarded certain privileges in the camp, and was allowed to 

keep one of her children. Her heartbreaking “Sophie’s choice” is which child she will 

choose. Ultimately, Sophie’s father, husband, and both children perished in the Holocaust 

and Sophie emigrates to the United States, only to later succumb to suicide. 

Sophie is the classic Aryan: she has long blonde hair, and wears a cross around her 

neck. And yet she suffers in the novel, and is indeed a Holocaust victim. This novel 

emphasizes that, like Sophie, many non-Jews “suffered as much as any Jew.” 29 Its critical 

success caused great controversy. On the one hand, Styron’s novel voiced a non- 

Jewish victim’s perspective on the Holocaust and helped enrich the moral imperative 

of the Holocaust. On the other hand, Sophie’s Choice popularized the dangerous 

and enduring Polish sentiment that the Nazis trampled all in their path, Pole and 

Jew alike. 30 

Many historians have similarly attributed suffering formerly considered to 

have been primarily meted out to Jewish victims to many other groups that were 

oppressed during the Second World War. For example, the fact that 1.6 million civilians 

died in the Soviet Gulag work camps has received little awareness outside Russia. 

31 Revisionist histories thus seek to deny the uniform assumptions embedded in 

terms like “German” and “Jew,” since this dichotomy tends to deny the former victim 

status, which can be a serious mistake. A recent book by historian R. M. Douglas 

reveals that an estimated 500,000 Germans lost their lives to starvation and extreme 

conditions in forced expulsions of German-speaking people from all over Europe in 

the immediate postwar period. 32 On the other hand, Peter Novick writes that such 

revisionist histories led to a “relativization” of the Holocaust, which, for Germans, 

“meant equating crimes against Germans to crimes by Germans.” 33 Timothy Snyder 

has argued in Bloodlands, his recent history of “Europe between Hitler and Stalin,” 

that the war era has a tragic but complicated history that deserves to be reckoned with 

on a case-by-case basis—the Holocaust alongside other atrocities. 34 

The spectrum of these accounts stretches from revisionist accounts like Styron’s, 

which aim at “tragic universalism,” 35 to exclusivist accounts that accused Styron 

of “stealing the Holocaust from the Jews who were its victims.” 36 Styron’s aim in Sophie’s 

Choice is not only to critique the notion that the Holocaust’s victims were solely 

Jewish, it is to exactly oppose it with tragic universalism—the idea that even though 

Jews were, as Styron put it, “victims of victims,” they were not the only victims. 37 Myers 

explains Styron’s particular flavor of revisionism as a direct counter to the Jewish 

“uniqueness hypothesis.” He writes that Styron “advances a universalist, even meta-



29 

physical interpretation, understanding the Holocaust as the embodiment of absolute 

evil, which threatened humanity as a whole.” 38 For Styron, the lesson of the Holocaust 

is precisely that “uniqueness is victimization, whether practiced by Germans or 

Jews.” 39 Moreover, to Styron the notion of a uniquely Jewish Holocaust wavered from 

the historical truth in its narrow story and became an insult to non-Jewish victims. 

Myers summarizes Styron’s conclusion: “[t]o remember the Holocaust as a uniquely 

Jewish catastrophe is to be Jews without memory”—a deliberate inversion of the 

“never forget” mantra touted by Jewish Holocaust remembrance organizations. 40 

So should we resist the expansion of the term “Holocaust” to other groups 

victimized during the Second World War? The many answers to this question have 

important political implications that make it more than an isolated academic or moral 

problem, and the biases resulting from the political nature of this question present 

a problem for Holocaust discourse. Styron, a non-Jew himself, was also a newspaper 

columnist known for wide-ranging, politically liberal commentaries. 41 He wanted to 

unsettle the narrative of the Holocaust that took only a Jewish perspective insofar as 

it made little more than “fleeting references to the vast multitudes of non-Jews—the 

myriad Slavs and the Gypsies—who were swallowed up in the apparatus of the camps, 

perishing just as surely as the Jews, though sometimes only less methodically.” 42 He 

went further. Unsatisfied with the idea that the Jewish narratives he criticized were 

merely a myopic vision of the whole picture, Styron touched on dangerous ground 

when he, according to Myers, criticized “the Jews’ own ignorance of the reality of 

Auschwitz and their willingness to lay claim to it to further their own ideological 

goals” 43 and, in his own words, defend their “precious heritage of suffering.” 44 

As an exemplar of non-Jewish sufferers, Sophie lives a devastating life during 

and after the Holocaust. During her time at Auschwitz, Sophie is taken up by 

Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss as a personal assistant and typist. In an effort to 

save her son, Sophie is forced to seduce Höss, the man running the despicable operation 

that has already killed her father, husband, and daughter. Even after coming to 

America, Sophie is not safe from the horrors of her past. Like most Jewish victims, 

she is haunted by her history and is unable to shed her guilt from sentencing her 

daughter to the gas chambers and working as an accomplice to Höss. Her particular 

suffering as a woman is revealed when, even in prosperous postwar New York City, 

she is “digitally raped” by a stranger on the subway—an experience that “upset the 

fragile balance of her newly renovated psyche” and made her feel once again “the 

freezing cold of the spirit.” 45 In response to the claim that the German program of 

exterminating the Jews was “the worst that had ever happened,” 46 Styron charges advocates 

of such an idea with belittling and indeed forgetting the suffering of others, 

of all demographics, both in and outside the Holocaust. 

Styron’s perspective, and revisionist accounts generally, though they admirably 

aim at moral complexity, are often simply and dangerously historically disingenuous: 

by modern estimates, at least 90 percent of the 1.1 million who perished 

in Auschwitz were Jews. 47 Thus, his choice of a female Polish-Catholic Holocaust 

victim could not be called representative of the total toll of victims. Leaving aside 

his broader accusations, Styron’s case that there has been disproportional attention 

to Jewish victims gains some credibility when we zoom out to the broader death toll 

of Hitler’s war. By the traditional definition of the Holocaust, the scholarly consensus 

is that 5.9 million out of 11 million total Holocaust victims were Jews. 48 One 

scholar arrives at 17 million total victims by including Polish and Soviet civilians in 

addition to the primarily targeted groups of Jews, Gypsies, the handicapped, political 

dissidents, religious dissenters, and homosexuals. 49 Either way, the death rate for 

Jews was astronomically higher: about 78 percent of Europe’s Jews perished in the 

Holocaust, compared to 1.4 to 3 percent for non-Jews, 50 and 25 percent for Roma 

(Gypsies), another targeted ethnic group. 51 Though the total catastrophe of World 

War II claimed at least 60 million lives according to these sources, the sheer level of 

targeting that befell Jews is especially horrifying and indeed unique. As one Jewish 

commentator pointed out, “the inescapable truth that to be Jewish was to be marked 

for death.” 52 Thus both Wiesel’s limited narrative and Styron’s ambitious but historically 

disingenuous narrative miss the mark. 

To get at this question away from the political divide, I think we must look 

at the reason behind the “never forget” educational and cultural model: to preserve 

and share historical truth so that such crimes are never repeated. To this end, revisionist 

accounts open the story to a multitude of perspectives that complicate the moral 

message in a constructive and true way. On the other hand, these accounts can stray 

dangerously far from the historical reality and the truth of the Jewish experience. As 

has been superbly illustrated by the permanent exhibition at the Illinois Holocaust 

Museum and Education Center in Skokie, the Holocaust was a morally complex 

event, with both guilty and innocent Germans (the exhibit features Oskar Schindler, 

a member of the Nazi party who saved thousands of Jews) and the same for every 

demographic. The end of the exhibit makes explicit parallels between the Nazi Holocaust, 

the American internment of Japanese prisoners during WWII, and the present 

day genocide in Darfur, forcing “us” and “them” onto the same morally fallible plane. 

It is in this light that the Illinois Holocaust Museum’s youth exhibition asks children 

to “respect differences, address bullying, and take a stand on issues that matter to 

them” and places Holocaust heroes like Anne Frank in side-by-side comparison with 

others like Rosa Parks and a professional wrestler who stood up for gay rights. 53 This 

is indeed a contextualizing and relativizing of the Jewish Holocaust, being deliberately 

conducted by a primarily Jewish institution. 

Holocaust survivor Primo Levi likewise strongly criticized moves to separate 

sanctified Jewish victims from evil perpetrators. Like the Illinois Holocaust Museum, 

he supported a case for moral complexity with his concept of a moral “gray zone” into 

which all victims were degraded. 54 On the black-and-white divide between “sanctified” 

victims and “evil” perpetrators, Levi wrote:



31 

[T]he Lager [death camp]… is a gray zone, poorly defined, where 

the two camps of masters and servants both diverge and converge. 

This gray zone possesses an incredibly complicated internal structure 

and contains within itself enough to confuse our need to judge. 55 

Levi’s personal experience with the Judenräten, Jewish prisoners who became accomplices 

to the Nazis in hopes of survival, led him to believe that all human beings are 

capable of the same evil, and that the real universal enemy was totalitarianism. Extending 

this principle of universalism, the same might be said for victims: any group 

could be the victim of vicious violence. Accounts of the Holocaust like these present 

a morally complex story, a story that can make all people pause and consider the evils 

of the Holocaust, and also one that does not distort the reality of the Holocaust as a 

predominantly Jewish catastrophe. 

Universalist conclusions, though numerous, did not sit well with many 

Jews, particularly Holocaust survivors. Elie Wiesel has written that in Holocaust revisionist 

fiction, “Novelists made free use of [the Holocaust]… In doing so they cheapened 

[it], drained it of its substance. The Holocaust is now a hot topic, fashionable, 

guaranteed to gain attention and to achieve instant success.” 56 To Wiesel, narratives 

like Sophie’s Choice, written by non-Jewish and non-victim authors, have cheapened 

the Holocaust and made it an acceptable topic for entertainment. This view contests 

the idea that Sophie’s Choice, a purely fictional account, could claim the same authority 

as thousands of real narratives. 

Puzzled by the Holocaust’s unique notoriety in American life, Peter Novick 

asks a question that I think gets to the heart of our problem: “Why, since there was 

no real or metaphorical family connection, should non-Jewish Americans mourn 

Hitler’s Jewish victims more than Pol Pot’s Cambodian victims?” 57 My answer is that 

they shouldn’t, but that they do so because, for various reasons, American culture 

focuses on the Holocaust more than many other atrocities. We have to acknowledge 

that whichever victims we empathize with are determined by our often distorted collective 

memory. 

Elie Wiesel describes the Holocaust as “a unique Jewish tragedy with universal 

implications,” but this statement is self-defeating. 58 When those implications 

are limited to certain groups, they become cheapened to culturally prescribed lessons 

that leave out important ideas. Wiesel’s narrative approaches the Holocaust only from 

a religious Jewish perspective and is thus incomplete. Peter Novick calls it “an intellectual 

sleight of hand,” which prevents the Holocaust’s moral imperative from being 

internalized. 59 He continues, “The repeated assertion that whatever the United States 

has done to blacks, Native Americans, Vietnamese, or others pales in comparison to 

the Holocaust is true—and evasive.” 60 A position such as the one that Novick criticizes 

demands that we make an impossible judgment: whether other atrocities from 

the Second World War and up to the present day are “truly holocaustal or merely 

genocidal.” 61 Furthermore, a narrative of the Holocaust that allows for only a Jewish 

perspective will be less ethically potent. Such a narrative narrows the audience of 

what should be a story for all humanity. It distracts from what should be the lessons 

of the Holocaust—the reminder that such crimes are never acceptable and that every 

human has an ethical obligation to live by that maxim. 

Ultimately, if a fictional, revisionist narrative like Sophie’s Choice is able to 

communicate the Holocaust’s complicated history in a meaningful way, it ought to 

occupy a place in the Holocaust canon—not to tell the whole story on its own, but to 

problematize monolithic accounts of a Jewish Holocaust just as they problematize it. 

To me, Styron’s novel makes the Holocaust’s universal guilt and moral responsibility 

crushingly close and haunting. For the sake of respecting all victims, maintaining a 

truthful amount of historical complexity, and, most importantly, preventing future 

atrocities, we must consider all of the Holocaust’s victims, and all its universal implications. 

However, opening the Holocaust equally to all alleged victims risks distorting 

the reality that the Holocaust was a predominantly Jewish catastrophe fueled by 

a unique prejudice. 

After the Holocaust we are left, above all else, with an imperative to uncover 

the truth. That said, we should cling neither to a Jewish-only Holocaust nor to a revisionist 

account in which all groups were victimized equally, because both stray from 

the Holocaust’s complicated history. If revisionist accounts lead us to sympathize also 

with non-Jewish victims, just as Jewish accounts like Wiesel’s lead us to sympathize 

with Jews, we are left with both a truer and richer understanding of the Holocaust. 

Notes 

1 The Oxford English Dictionary Online, s.v. “Holocaust.” 

2 Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, trans. Daniel Heller- 

Roazen (New York: Zone Books, 2002), 30-31. 

3 Yehuda Bauer, Rethinking the Holocaust (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), xiii. 

4 Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American Life (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1999), 63-64. 

5 Ibid., 64 

6 Ibid., 65 

7 “Atrocities: Capture of the German Concentration Camps Piles up Evidence of Barbarism 

that Reaches the Low Point of Human Degradation,” Life Magazine, May 7, 1945. 

8 Novick, 63, 66 

9 Ibid., 103 

10 Ibid., 103 

11 Nathan Glazer, American Judaism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957) (in 

Novick, 105). 

12 Leo Bogart, “The Response of Jews in America to the European Catastrophe, 1941-45,” 

(Masters thesis, University of Chicago, 1948), 4 (in Novick, 105). 

13 Novick, 121



33 

14 “Scientific Research on Anti-Semitism: Paper Delivered by John Slawson, Executive Vice- 

President of AJ Committee at NCRAC,” (September 11, 1944) (in Novick, 121). 

15 Novick, 122 

16 Elie Wiesel, Night (New York: Hill and Wang) 2006, x. 

17 Ibid., xiv. 

18 I will be referring to the following version: Anne Frank, The Diary of A Young Girl (Garden 

City, NY: Doubleday, 1952). 

19 Lawrence Graver, An Obsession with Anne Frank: Meyer Levin and the Diary. (Berkeley and 

Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995), xiii. 

20 D.G. Myers, “Jews Without Memory: ‘Sophie’s Choice’ and the Ideology of Liberal Anti- 

Judaism,” American Literary History, Vol. 13, No. 3 (Autumn 2001): 499. 

21 Novick, 19 

22 Myers, 499 

23 Edward T. Linenthal, Preserving Memory: The Struggle to Create America’s Holocaust Museum 

(New York: Viking, 1995). 

24 Oren Baruch Stier, “Holocaust Icons: The Media of Memory,” in Impossible Images: 

Contemporary Art After the Holocaust, eds. Shelley Hornstein, Laura Levitt, and Laurence J. 

Silberstein (New York: New York University Press, 2003), 213. 

25 Wiesel, x 

26 Dutch Holocaust scholar Ernst Van Alphen is a good example of the second camp discussed 

above. He criticizes Wiesel’s work from the perspective as a non-Jewish boy growing 

up in the Netherlands in the 1960s. As was typical of European youth at the time, he writes 

that he “had the memory of the Second World War and the Holocaust drummed into my 

mind… But they failed to have the required effect.” Later he writes, “Holocaust narratives 

were dull to me … because they were told in such a way that I was not allowed to have 

my own response to them. My response … was already culturally prescribed or narratively 

programmed.… The narration of the past had no ambiguities; moral positions were fixed.” 

Particularly disturbing to Van Alphen was the idea that the Holocaust was part of a war 

waged by Allied heroes against Nazi villains, and that one side could claim to “win” such a 

catastrophe. Told these tales, he did not feel treated as a “human being with moral responsibility.” 

Ernst Van Alphen, Caught by History: Holocaust Effects in Contemporary Art, Literature, 

and Theory (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 1-2. 

27 Novick, 3-4 

28 Myers, 499. 

29 William Styron, Sophie’s Choice (New York: Random House, 1979), 237. 

30 Jan T. Gross, Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland 

(Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2001). Gross’s work, which suggests 

that grassroots Polish anti-Semitism was a major force behind the Holocaust, was met with 

violent opposition from Polish gentiles who denied Gross’s proof of Polish compliance to the 

Nazis. 

31 Steven A. Barnes, Death and Redemption: The Gulag and the Shaping of Soviet Society (Princeton 

and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2011), 1. 

32 R. M. Douglas, Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans After the Second World 

War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012). 

33 Novick, 14 

34 Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (New York: Basic Books, 

2010). 

35 Myers, 500 

36 See “Stealing the Holocaust” in Alexander Edward, The Holocaust and the War of Ideas 

(New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 1994), 195. 

37 Styron, 518 

38 Myers, 500 

39 Ibid., 500 

40 Ibid. 

41 Ibid., 503 


43 Myers, 505 


45 Ibid., 100 

46 Otto Friedrich, The Kingdom of Auschwitz (New York: Harper, 1994), viii. 

47 Franciszek Piper, “Estimating the Number of Deportees to and Victims of the Auschwitz- 

Birkenau Camp,” Yad Vashem Studies 21 (1991): 49-103. 

48 Lucy S. Dawidowicz, The War Against the Jews, 1933–1945 (New York: Bantam Books, 

1986), 403. 

49 Donald L. Niewyk, The Columbia Guide to the Holocaust (New York: Columbia University 

Press, 2000) 45. 

50 Martin Gilbert, Atlas of the Holocaust (Oxford: Pergamon, 1988) 242–244. 

51 “Genocide of European Roma (Gypsies), 1939-1945,” United States Holocaust 

Memorial Museum, accessed Sept 18, 2012, http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article. 

php?ModuleId=10005219 

52 Gabriel Schoenfeld, “Auschwitz and the Professors,” Commentary 105 (June 1998): 42-46. 

53 “The Miller Family Youth Exhibition,” Illinois Holocaust Museum, accessed Sept. 16, 

2012, http://www.ilholocaustmuseum.org/pages/make_a_difference__the_miller_family_youth_exhibition/19.php 

54 Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved (New York: Vintage, 1989) 40. 

55 Ibid., 40-42 


57 Novick, 237 

58 Walter Goodman, “Israeli Clashes with American Jew about Persecution Past and Present,” 

The New York Times, September 9, 1984, 1:46. 

59 Novick, 9 

60 Ibid., 15 

61 Ibid., 14

Symposium: Sociology or Theology 

Jonathan Nathan, Dory Fox, Kayla Kirshenbaum, Eric Singerman, & Avi Levin 

“more than the jews have kept the 

sabbath, the sabbath has kept the jews.” 

-Ahad Ha’am, 1898 

. 

Makom invited responses to the above quote and the 

following questions: 

Are Jewish observance and identity more a matter 

of sociology or of theology? What is the relationship 

between observance and identity? 

Jonathan Nathan The Jewish Whalers 

Sociology or Theology 

Imagine a whaleship, and bear with me. 

The ship is at sea for a specific purpose: to hunt and kill whales for their oil. 

If there were no market for whale oil, there would be no whaleship. If no one believed 

that sperm whales existed, there would be no whaleship. 

But the ship is full of activity that has nothing to do with whaling. The 

cook has developed a unique menu. The sailors have invented an ingenious variation 

of contract bridge, which they hardly ever play on Sundays. And as a sign of their 

membership in the gallant crew, they cut off the tips of their right pinkies, even if 

they think it’s gross. 

Moreover, the population of the ship is not uniformly committed to the 

project of whaling. Some crewmembers deny the very existence of whales, even 

though they’re willing to stay on board because they grew up on the ship. Others, 

seeking a direct experience of the Cetacean, declare organized whaling to be 

an impediment to their happiness and threaten to strike off on their own in small 

whaleboats. 

I propose that Judaism works on a similar principle: Judaism is a nation 

whose raison d’être is a collective religious history. Starting with the generation that 

crossed the Jordan, the Jews have been sustained by a national memory of revelation, 

if not a direct experience of revelation itself. 

But Judaism is also filled with activity that has intrinsically little to do with 

this religious experience—consider Israeli dancing, the Hebrew language, borscht, 

and latkes. Institutions like these are important to Judaism and common to most 

Jews, but unconnected to religion. 

Moreover, many Jews renounce the religious aspect of Judaism. Though this 

decision separates them from the central Jewish project, it does not remove them in 

the slightest from the Jewish nation. An atheist Jew can still be important to her community, 

can still find prayer beautiful, and can still look forward to Shabbat dinner 

every week. In much the same way, the ship’s cook has no interest in whaling, but 

he is just as much on board the ship as anyone else. The only difference between the 

cook and the whalers is that a ship full of cooks would have no reason to exist. 

All this granted, though, theology is at the root of Judaism, in three different 

senses of that phrase. In the first place, theology has historically provided the 

basis for the forms of Jewish practice. A completely secular Friday-night dinner is 

conceivable, but it is difficult to imagine its having been sustained over the millennia 

without its status as a commemoration of Creation. In the same vein, the only reason 

that Passover is today a dynamic and empowering cultural experience is that Jews 

over thousands of years believed that they should recount the story of the Exodus as 

real history. 

Second, theology is the only thing that unites every Jewish community on 

35

36 MAKOM Symposium 

Sociology orTheology 

37 

Earth. The Jews have very little national history beyond the Revelation and the few 

centuries that followed it: Iraqi and Ethiopian Jews had already left the scene, for instance, 

by the time the Romans occupied Jerusalem. There are also next to no cultural 

practices that are common to all Jews. (I find gefilte fish revolting and Ashkenazic 

music vapid. Less trivially, put a Jew from Latvia in a room with a Jew from Cape 

Town, and they’ll stare at each other without a language in common.) Even the Rabbinical 

Law came too late to reach some far-flung communities. But there is no Jewish 

community on Earth that does not recognize the Revelation as a national event. 

Finally, and most importantly, the theological element of Judaism is the 

only thing that gives Jewish practice special meaning. There is no society on earth 

that is not filled with idiosyncrasies, and Jewish idiosyncrasies are perhaps more notable, 

and certainly more ancient, than those of other groups. So the cultural anthropologist 

might want to examine the sociological innards of Judaism in order to satisfy 

his curiosity. There is no reason, though, why that anthropologist should be more 

interested in Jewish culture than that of any other ethnic group: a bagel is no more 

intrinsically noteworthy than a slab of pork, and the hora is simply a Balkan dance. 

Seen from the outside, though, the Jews are marked by a central project more important 

than all of their idiosyncrasies, and which sets them apart from other nations: 

responding to a revelation at Mount Sinai. 

. . 

“Who are the Jews?” 

“A group of Hebrew-speaking Europeans and Africans that complains endearingly, 

tells sardonic jokes, eats bagels, doesn’t pick up the phone on Saturdays 

(though different Jewish cultures have variations on this custom), and is committed 

to the ethical principle of tikkun olam.” 

“And what was the Pequod?” 

“It was a ship of men who always used to sling their hammocks from the 

third hook up the post, some of whom hunted whales, and who ate each piece of 

toast with two squares of butter…” 

Dory Fox The Theater of Religion 

Religion is both a way of organizing life and a way of representing it. By 

“representing” I mean that religious rituals present the community’s values to itself 

and thereby re-enforce connectivity within the religious group. 1 If we think of religious 

ritual in this way, we can compare it to other collective experiences of reflexive 

representation and perhaps gain insight into what religion does for us and how it 

does this. By comparing the experiences of attending the synagogue and the theater 

it becomes clear that communities can reach a level of transcendence through means 

other than strictly religious rituals. By understanding the overlapping sociological 

functions of the synagogue and the theater, we can see that the Jewish religion functions 

first and foremost as a way to uphold common values and to experience connectivity 

to other humans. 

Religious experience and Jewish theater have been associated for quite a 

while. S. Ansky’s 1914 Yiddish Modernist play The Dybbuk became a hit–it was 

translated, performed and adapted widely—because people found the experience of 

seeing it somehow transcendent. Many playgoers and critics used Jewish religious 

terminology to explain the experience. One journalist in Vilna wrote that his experience 

seeing the play made him “shudder with hadres koydesh,” the holy and awesome 

splendor of God. 2 

It is useful to understand this phenomenon of transcendence in the context 

of a particular shift in the early twentieth century, in which theater came to replace 

church or synagogue as a source of philosophical reflection and communal experience. 

This was an explicit tenet of the great Constanin Stanislawsky’s expressionist 

philosophy of theater, which dominated the Jewish theater scene in Europe when 

The Dybbuk first appeared. 3 The ritual of going to the theater was surely a significant 

social event prior to the twentieth century. What is new here is that theater became a 

recognized source of transcendent experience. 4 

But synagogue and theater share more than transcendent experiences. They 

are both spaces in which people act with prescribed, ritualistic manners: they watch 

intently, laugh, and clap at the right moments. They bow, say amen, and kiss at the 

right moments. Families enter and take their seats to find a set, rehearsed program 

carried out by a (hopefully skilled) practitioner. There ought not be any talking during 

the program but it’s really inevitable, and someone in the family is always relieved 

at the unfurling of the curtain or the stowing of the tales at the end of the program. 

This is all part of the ritual and it is done not so much for the sake of the actors on 

stage, or the cantor, or even for God. In my mind, the players and the prayers are but 

a pretext for the illicit chats and the surreptitious looks amidst the action; though 

these chats and looks are not the “main event” they are quite ritualistic. Theater 

and synagogue are social spaces in which the most significant performances happen 

in the supposed audience or congregation, and not on the stage or the bima. The 

theater provides a chance to imagine a different world and the synagogue offers an 

opportunity to communicate with the divine, but people are inclined to sneak bits of 

their own mundane worlds into these experiences through stolen glances and hushed 

comments: the experience is just as much about seeing the others around you and 

having them see you. 5 

Durkheim writes that in certain collective rituals an individual experiences 

collective effervescence, in which “it is as if he was in reality transported into a special 

world entirely different from the one in which he ordinarily lives, a special world 

with intense forces that invade and transform him.” 6 This sounds nice enough and



39 

it accounts for the transcendent power of theater and synagogue; but then why do 

we whisper and gaze off in the middle of services? It seems to me that humans have 

a need to escape the quotidian and yet also a need to be hyper-aware of it. It is both 

these needs that drive the rituals of theater and synagogue. In both these settings the 

rituals on stage and in the audience are about the community seeing itself and affirming 

its values. 

The mechanics of theater and of religious ritual are roughly the same, and 

the sensations they provide are also similar. This leads me to believe that we can 

achieve legitimate comfort, interpersonal connectedness, and maybe even awesome 

splendor during a theater performance. Moreover, this comparative exercise illustrates 

that as Jews we do not necessarily participate in the religion so that God Almighty 

can see us in synagogue and rejoice that we are proficiently fulfilling his commandments. 

Rather, we primarily take part in Judaism in order to come together and see 

ourselves as human beings with connections to other human beings. 

Kayla Kirshenbaum The Sinner’s Waltz 

So you call me a sinner 

because I don’t believe I’m a chosen one. 

Mourn me like dead 

because I fell in love with a city named Berlin. 

Shake your head at me and scowl 

because I’ll never use a matchmaker, 

and 

the concept is insulting, 

and 

I don’t even own a white tablecloth. 

Click your tongue at me 

because I’m moving to Chicago 

because New York is not a place for me 

or anyone who gives a shit about 

something 

other than the 

nothing 

of 

Brooklyn and boroughs 

and thriving on misery 

and 

the way the streets 

buzz with the hum of the homeless, the hopeless 

and 

the lack of trees 

and grace 

and oxygen 

chokes 

me. 

Glare at me 

because I wear long skirts with pride 

or 

because I wear tight pantsa 

temptress, 

a distraction. 

Even though you shouldn’t be looking at all. 

Spread gossip about me 

because I chose to study in China, 

where my shidduch does not await me, 

where my faith will be challenged, 

where my choices bring a future that is mine. 

Shriek 

and scream at me, even in the heart of my homeland, 

because my black tights aren’t enough for you 

or 

because you consider my clothing the uniform of men 

and 

we may never agree on the status of women 

because 

I will never apologize 

for being a woman, 

for being a feminist, 

who works a lifelong shift as a mother, 

who works in labs spare time as a chemist. 

So you call me a sinner 

and I rear my head at you 

and I give you the evil eye 

because I don’t believe in superstitions, 

or the science that disproves a god. 

We sinners, we spin, blurred, wildly out of focus, 

dragging ourselves in a drunken man’s waltz 

along the trail that drowns us in 

curdled milk and sour honey. 

Author’s Commentary: 

This poem, The Sinner’s Waltz, reflects on the disparity in the Modern Orthodox community 

between religiously rooted traditions, on the one hand, and practices invented by religious 

leadership and rooted in social pressure, on the other. These socially enforced practices become an imposing 

force and take on the name of theology. Indeed, when the Modern Orthodox community attempts 

to fuse the theological and sociological in its practices, the result can sometimes leave a young



41 

Jewish person grappling with the expectations of his or her community rather than his or her faith. 

More specifically, the social pressure discussed in this poem is gendered. This biased social 

pressure becomes threaded through a set of successive practices in the young woman’s life. The social 

pressure for a young modern Orthodox woman to marry is felt as an urgent and external social 

force; no such pressure exists for a young modern Orthodox man. It is typical of a modern Orthodox 

woman to shift her line of work if it does not accommodate the potential opportunity to bare 

children—a social given in most modern Orthodox communities. A woman who wants to be a 

physician, for example, is often encouraged to pursue a different line of work that accommodates a 

lifestyle with children, while it is rare that a modern orthodox man will ever face such a dilemma. 

These are but a few examples. 

Eric Singerman Then the Lord God said, “It is not good for man to be alone.” 1 

In the beginning of October, I was asked to give a d’var torah on Parshat 

B’reishit. As a relatively secular Jew I was left at a bit of a loss. So I did what I 

always do when I’m confused or lost within the world: I Googled. I soon found that 

Parshat B’reishit is the beginning of the first book of the Bible. After a good deal 

more work, I think I ended up doing a decent job of sharing my thoughts. Allow 

me to take you through the process. 

Since my beloved days of Hebrew School, I’ve wondered what it might 

have been like to be Adam in the Garden of Eden. He, perhaps more than any 

other man, went through major changes. These changes in Adam provide clues as to 

how I and perhaps all other Jews or even all other humans connect with God and 

other individuals. Adam’s experiences teach us that we are, as human beings in the 

world, in a constant state of solitude, and even that we may be naturally estranged 

from God. On the other hand, the changes that Adam experienced offer hope that 

we may be able to transcend solitude—rather than just ignore it. As I see it, this 

transcendence can be achieved only through connections to other people—not to 

God. 

Octavio Paz, winner of the 1990 Nobel Prize in literature, sums up 

human solitude and loneliness better than I ever could: “Self-discovery is above all 

the realization that we are alone...we sense our aloneness almost as soon as we are 

born...astonished at the fact of [our] being.” 2 Paz expounds upon this idea, writing 

that we feel alone not just from being self-aware but also because we acknowledge 

a wall between ourselves and the rest of the world. However, I doubt that Adam 

actually felt alone in this way. Though he was more alone than any of us are, he 

lacked the key awareness of his solitude. 

Let me explain. One might think that Adam initially, as Earth’s only 

human, would have been lonely. Yet, Adam, before eating of the Tree of Knowledge, 

lacked self-awareness. In fact, before the creation of woman the text does not 

describe Adam’s interest in human company at all. The Torah tells us nothing 

of Adam’s sentiments: it only tells us that God saw that Adam needed a “ fitting 

helper.” 3 

The Torah writes that his “eyes...were opened” only after eating the fruit 

from the tree of knowledge. 4 We know that this moment made him aware of his 

nudity. Before that, he lacked a sense of shame – the sense that someone might be 

watching and judging him. Thus we know that he lacked awareness of himself as 

a person in relation to other people. Therefore, before this eye-opening moment 

he could not be lonely. Adam’s new awareness was the origin of his solitude 

because only with it did he begin to see himself in relation to others; only with this 

awareness could he see the wall between himself and the world. At that moment, 

Adam began to experience the world as we do. 

Some claim that we are not alone – that God truly knows us. Aside from 

being a weighty claim, which presupposes the existence of a God outside of the 

text-based God of the torah—and an omniscient God at that—this also does not 

solve the problem of human solitude in a satisfying way. Even if God knows us, we 

will never understand the ultimate metaphysical truths of divinity that would allow 

us to know God. This potential connection can never be reciprocal, and therefore 

only highlights our uniqueness and aloneness. We are always, to some extent, alone 

whether or not this fact floods our lives with solipsistic depression. 5 

You may not be able to fully connect with God but, set adrift in the 

infinite sea of loneliness that is our existence, you will be able to connect with 

another human being. In the moment of that connection the sea disappears and we 

are firmly grounded on the land of mutual understanding. In spite of our mental 

solitude and the wall that divides our minds, our feeling of solitude is no more. 

After all my Googling of B’reishit I think that I was able, if even for a brief 

moment, to connect with others, to escape solitude, not through God, not through 

the distractions of work or games, but through interpersonal connection. I shared 

my thoughts on the Torah, as Jews all around the world have done, week after week, 

year after year, for generations. 

Avi Levin The Nature of the Commandments 

In the Western world, Jews are often identified with a specific set of 

cultural practices, as if that cultural bond is enough to define Jews as a community. 1 

But that is clearly inadequate. Most of what is “Jewish” in a cultural sense is really 

just a slice of Eastern Europe transplanted to New York. Sephardim, Ethiopians, 

and Ashkenazim speak in different accents and languages, look different, and have 

different traditional foods, yet any one of these people is treated as a full-fledged 

Jew in nearly any synagogue in the world. Clearly, culture is not enough to define 

Jewishness. 

The rejection of culture as a definition of Judaism has been around for 

much longer than bagels and lox. The Prophets did not count the Jews as one of



43 

the seventy nations, but rather as a “light unto” them. A thousand years ago, Rabbi 

Sa’adia Gaon wrote that “The Jewish people are a nation only by virtue of their 

Torah.” 2 Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch went so far as to say that this is why God 

subjected the Jews to slavery, only to suddenly redeem them and bring them to 

Sinai: after stripping the Jews of a cultural and historical self-image, he provided the 

Torah in its stead. 3 

Yet a document can only serve as the definition of a people if it contains a 

message to live by, and the message of the Torah is ambiguous. In some places, the 

Torah is a legal code; in others, it is a pedagogical narrative. Which of these facets of 

the Torah defines the Jewish people? Is it the legal code, uniting Jews the world over 

through common ritual? Or is it the narrative, instilling in all of us a common set 

of values? 

Over the past two hundred years, both sides of this dichotomy have been 

used as bases for new Jewish communities. The leaders of the Jewish Enlightenment 

thought that ritual commandments were anachronisms, and that one could live as 

a Jew just by following the law’s moral precepts. 4 Mordecai Kaplan and his Reconstructionists 

believed that Judaism was a civilization centered on rituals, which did 

not have any theological imperative behind them. 5 Yet the movements that both 

camps founded have been suffering from attrition and ideological drift. 6 It seems 

that neither ritual nor theology is sufficient on its own. 

Of the two movements, the failure of the Reconstructionists is easier to 

understand. Immigrant ethnicities are mutable; as each generation becomes increasingly 

integrated into its host society, the habits of its parents and grandparents bear 

less and less weight, until they are firmly relics of the past. A hundred years of being 

a scattered minority is enough to destroy any civilization. 

The error of the Jewish Enlightenment in rejecting the commandments, 

on the other hand, was to misunderstand their nature. The commandments are 

not injunctions that Jews fulfill in order to gain reward; they are the means by 

which Jews individually and collectively come closer to God. Different branches of 

Judaism posit different mechanics of this process: Kabbalists, acquiring the latent 

spiritual potential in creation; ethicists, the effects of a highly disciplined life on our 

personal character; Rabbi Hirsch, their power to directly impress symbolic messages 

on the mind. Yet all of these interpretations rest on the same fundamental principle: 

Judaism is not just a religion, but an inspired way of life—and attempting to strip it 

of its active nature strips away a piece of its soul. 

Notes 

Dory Fox The Theater of Religion 

1 This perspective is largely derived from Emile Durkheim’s theory of religion, as found in 

Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, trans. Karen E. Fields (New York: 

The Free Press, 1995), originally published in 1912. 

2 Michael C. Steinlauf, “‘Fardibekt!’: An-sky’s Polish Legacy,” in The Worlds of S. An-sky: 

A Russian Jewish Intellectual at the Turn of the Century, ed. Gabriella Safran and Steven J. 

Zipperstein, 232-51 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006). Although “The Dybbuk” 

features Jewish traditions and rituals, the religious subject matter created only part of the 

strong reactions of playgoers. 


4 In other terms, people began to be aware of a certain Durkheimian collective effervescence 

when they went to theater houses. 

5 That is why dressing for the occasion is important: attendants would probably not wear the 

same clothing to work, school, or the grocery store. 

6 Durkheim, page 220. 

Eric Singerman Then the Lord God said, “It is not good for man to be alone.” 1 

1 Genesis 2:18 JPS Translation 

2 Paz, Octavio, The Labyrinth of Solitude, Grove Press Inc. 1972. New York 

3 Genesis 2:18 

4 Genesis 3:7 

5 Depression is not the only outcome of an awareness of solitude. When God expelled Adam 

and Eve from Eden, he condemned them to work the land. Paz writes of work as a life raft, 

that we can escape the feeling of loneliness through “games and work.” But these are only 

escapist activities. Even Paz admits that they only allow us to “forget” our solitude. In our 

world after Eden, these things merely distract us from our loneliness. Paz, page1 

Avi Levin The Nature of the Commandments 

1 Molly Katz, Jewish as a Second Language (New York: Workman, 1991); Seinfeld, broadcast 

by NBC 1989-1998 

2 Sa’adia ben Joseph, The Book of Beliefs and Opinions, trans. Samuel Rosenblatt (New Haven: 

Yale, 1976), 158 (3:7). My citation is a paraphrase of the original English rendering, “... 

our nation of the Children of Israel is a nation only by virtue of its laws.” 

3 th 

Joseph Elias, Trans., The Nineteen Letters. (New York: Feldheim 1995), 121 (notes to 8 

letter). Letters is written by Hirsch, the comments are by Elias. 

4 Cf. David Phillipson, The Reform Movement in Judaism (New York: Macmillan, 1907), 6 

(introduction). 

5 Charles Liebman, “Reconstructionism in American Jewish Life” American Jewish Year Book 

71 (1970) 6-7 

6 Cf. Chaim I. Waxman. “Winners and Losers in Denominational Memberships in the 

United States.” Written October 16, 2005. Accessed November 21, 2012. http://jcpa.org/ 

article/winners-and-losers-in-denominational-memberships-in-the-united-states/

“She Got What She Deserved”: 

Representations of Transgressive Womanhood in 

Jewish Literature, 1900-1924 


Hundreds of thousands of immigrants from Eastern Europe flooded the 

shores of New York City between 1900 and 1924. A new literature accompanied 

this mass immigration. It was composed in part of success stories of wealth amassed 

and lives rebuilt in America and in part of horror stories of women brought down 

by the thirst for the fineries that awaited them in a new land. In both Eastern European 

and American literature, Jewish authors positioned young women and their 

transgressions as the most hazardous threats to Jewish communities. This literature 

review focuses on four stories in particular: Peretz Hirschbein’s play, Miriam (1906); 

Shalom Asch’s play, God of Vengeance (1907); Joseph Opatoshu’s short story, “New 

World Idyll” (1912); and Anzia Yezierska’s Salome of the Tenements (1923). 

Though more general claims about twentieth-century Jewry cannot be 

supported by four texts, these four do represent certain trends. First, these texts 

prescribe a pure Jewish womanhood defined primarily against material and sexual 

temptations and social climbing. In these tales, virtuous Jewish womanhood consists 

of resisting the desire to amass money and the dangers of premarital sex and 

adultery, but it lacks a positive form. 

This absence of positive prescriptions for Jewish American ghetto femininity, 

as seen in these particular texts, allowed for new identity formations in America 

that, in their unconventionality, might have been labeled as delinquent and transgressive. 

Although my primary geographic focus for this project is America, three of 

the four texts examined here were written in Yiddish and tell stories set in unspecified 

or explicitly Eastern-European locations. Yezierska’s Salome of the Tenements 

is the only text written in English and published in America. Opatoshu’s “New 

World Idyll,” though initially published in Yiddish, was translated into English for 

the literary journal Pagan, and both plays, Hirschbein’s Miriam and Asch’s God of 

Vengeance, were originally published and performed on the Yiddish stage in Eastern 

Europe. Eastern European texts remain relevant to my project because they were 

often circulated in America. Jews maintained disparate diasporic communities for 

thousands of years across national or continental divides; they were united by cultural 

forms that had the capacity to transmit Jewish thought, by words, beyond the 

face-to-face communities defined by geographic proximity. Thus, the Eastern European 

texts included here give a sense of the ways in which Ashkenazi Jews of the 

period were thinking about and representing transgressive femininities, regardless 

“She Got What She Deserved” 

of residence. Although general conclusions cannot be made about early twentiethcentury 

Jewish femininity based on four texts, these texts remain valuable examples 

of the treatment of young women who strayed from paths of expected gendered 

domesticity. I chose these texts based on their date of publication, their mass appeal, 

and their explicitness in treating female transgression. 

One thread that unites these four stories is their fierce condemnation of 

illicit sexuality as the deepest possible form of transgression. Though a few of the 

texts critique other forms of deviation with an equally suspicious eye, these other 

improprieties are portrayed as threatening in large part due to the possibility that 

they might lead to illicit sex. 1 Hirschbein’s Miriam and Asch’s God of Vengeance 

serve as overt warnings of a young woman’s fall from purity and its consequences in 

the Yiddish world. In Hirschbein’s Miriam the eponymous anti-heroine begins as 

a naive stocking-mender new to city life. She fits the traditional mold of a woman 

in danger of falling into prostitution: her landlords are her only family, she makes 

a scant living mending stockings, and she imagines marrying a rich man as her 

pathway out of poverty. Her relationship with the wealthy Zilberman immediately 

creates a discord in the house between Miriam, flattered with the attention thrust 

upon her as the object of a moneyed man’s desire, and the rest of the home’s inhabitants, 

who fear that Miriam’s lingering country naïveté might make her susceptible 

to shame at Zilberman’s hands. Even Miriam senses the class disparity that stands 

between them. She tells her affluent beau, “I always think: I shouldn’t let myself get 

so close to you. Here in the basement they’re always giving me a hard time—and 

they’re right… I’m a poor girl, a small-town girl, and you—you couldn’t possibly 

love me. I’m—I’m an orphan….” Zilberman consoles Miriam, asking, “If I’m rich, 

so what? What difference does that make to us? Look; I wanted to get to know you, 

and I didn’t pay attention to anything; just the way you are, that’s how I like you. 

To hell with wealth!” 2 And, with a kiss, Miriam finally determines to run away to 

Zilberman to achieve her independence. Zilberman has already promised to support 

her in an attic room—a promotion from her basement tenancy to that point—and 

made a vague commitment to a marriage that never comes to pass. Miriam gets 

pregnant, Zilberman abandons her, and she desperately seeks other avenues of support. 

Miriam’s former friends and landlords, however, express disapproval and even 

disgust toward her newly tainted womanhood. Toward the end of Act III, Miriam’s 

former landlords discuss her state: 

Dvoyre. Miriam. May anyone who wishes me ill come to such a pass. 

Shimen. Ha, how’s she doing, that tramp? 

Leah. There you go! Why does she deserve a name like that? What’s she 

up to? … How is she? Why doesn’t she come over? 

Jonah. He dumped her six months ago. 

Dvoyre. Apparently she’s darning stockings again. If you could only see 

her. (Tearfully.) Her face is so pale and drawn. 

Leah. She was so pretty, so young. 

45

46 MAKOM Leah Reis-Dennis 


47 

Shimen. Whose fault is it? She got what she deserved. 3 

Miriam’s landlords’ largely unsympathetic response is remarkable for its 

violently accusatory tone regarding Miriam’s illicit sexuality as well as for presupposing 

that her fate is irreversibly sealed. Shimen’s description of Miriam as a “tramp” 

and his quip that “she got what she deserved” place the onus of the blame for the 

unintended pregnancy onto Miriam without discussing Zilberman’s role in the 

conception. Furthermore, though Leah demonstrates the most compassion in the 

conversation, she describes Miriam’s youth and beauty in the past tense and thereby 

implies that with her virginity gone Miriam’s other positive attributes are also no 

longer. 

The most incendiary send up of Miriam’s out-of-wedlock pregnancy comes 

from Dvoshe, the long-lost wife of an incidental character who enters the scene of 

Miriam’s labor with little explanation. In that scene, she verbally abuses Miriam: 

Her mother must be spinning in her grave… The devil won’t get his due 

today. Decent women kick the bucket in childbirth… But this one—worse than 

a bitch! … Nu, Mirele, is it good and painful? … They should die—them and 

their children together! They shouldn’t get any mercy…. I’ve never heard of such a 

thing…. A girl with no parents, a pauper, should get herself into a mess like this! 

Woe to parents in this world with such children, and a curse on the ones in the 

world to come…. What was I dragged here for? … It would have gone fine without 

me too…You’d be better off sending someone to the shul to say Psalms and the 

prayer for a woman in labor…. You won’t die, you won’t die. Decent women will 

die in childbirth before their time because of you, but you … you won’t die. 4 

Here, Dvoshe offers perhaps the most uncensored and illiberal Jewish response 

to Miriam’s sexual transgression. She addresses Miriam’s labor with superstition 

instead of sympathy. She implies that Miriam deserves a fate worse than death 

and that the only way to ward off the chaos brought on by Miriam’s misbehavior is 

to revert to religion and prayer. 

Miriam does not treat herself with any more sympathy than do her detractors. 

Her loss of virginity without marriage shames her to such a great extent that 

she is unwilling and unable to redeem herself socially. Though she insists, “I don’t 

think I did anything wrong … ” she also admits that 

This idea worked its way into my head … that I was the worst. … I felt 

like there was this black stain on my face, and everyone was looking at 

me. I went to the storekeeper … and the way the girls looked at me … 

and whispered. … I was still in my fifth month … you couldn’t tell anything 

… and they were whispering. 5 

Guilt ridden, Miriam is unable to interact socially or professionally. Ironically, her 

guilt thus forces her to seek economic redemption in the form of prostitution, 

which in turn only exacerbates her feelings of guilt and sexual wrongdoing. 

Miriam reveals her deep shame and self-consciousness in an extensive 

monologue in the play’s final act. There, she admits to several failed abortion attempts 

and haunting dreams of her late mother. Meanwhile, Grunye, another prostitute, 

drunkenly recounts her family’s emotionally and physically abusive response 

to her pregnancy outside of marriage. Hirschbein conveys their deep hopelessness. 

After sharing their stories of pregnancy out of wedlock, Miriam declares, “I’m going 

to break free again … you’ll see.” But Grunye remains disengaged, commanding 

Miriam, “Drink; there’s no way out for us… none!” 6 Miriam’s own emotional, 

physical, and mental downfall—accented by Grunye’s alcoholic, depressive rage— 

serves as a warning to playgoers that the repercussions of illicit sexuality reverberate 

on both individual and social levels. 

Sholem Asch presents a similar downward spiral in God of Vengeance—a 

play that opened to great acclaim in Eastern Europe but met with obscenity charges 

upon its arrival on Broadway. The play centers on Yekel, a brothel owner, and his 

wife Sarah, a former prostitute, who strive to give their daughter, Rivkele, a life 

untainted by the brothel just one floor beneath her bedroom. The action turns on 

Yekel’s purchase of a Holy Scroll, which is designed to augment Rivkele’s holiness 

by proximity and to elevate their status in the Jewish community. Yekel and Sarah, 

despite their participation in prostitution, maintain that their daughter’s virginity 

is the ultimate embodiment of holiness and purity. Resigned to their own impurities, 

they go to great lengths to maintain Rivkele’s wholesomeness—in large part to 

make her an attractive marriage candidate and to redeem themselves in God’s eyes. 

They forbid her from interacting with the prostitutes of her age who work and live 

in the cellar beneath her, and they fearfully hope that her unholy surroundings will 

go unnoticed in the approaching matchmaking process. Even though Yekel and 

Sarah earn a living by selling sex, they firmly believe in the importance of young 

women’s virginity—a belief that abounds in Jewish literature of the period. As the 

play progresses, Rivkele runs away from home for a tryst with a female prostitute 

and for a stint as a prostitute herself. When she returns home her parents obsess 

over her virginity—the hallmark of her former purity and her value as a marriageable 

young Jewish woman. 

This incident represents yet another instance in Jewish literature of the 

period in which the illicit loss of virginity is the most shameful form of sex. Yekel, 

struggling to ask his daughter explicitly about her virginity, employs various euphemisms. 

He asks, “Are you still as pure as when you left the house? Are you still a 

virtuous Jewish daughter?” He continues, despite Sarah’s protestations and Rivkele’s 

discomfort, “Are you still an innocent Jewish child?” Increasing his volume, he 

demands, “Are you still a chaste Jewish daughter? Tell me—tell me at once!” Rivkele 

responds with an accusation of her own, exclaiming, “It was all right for Mamma, 

wasn’t it? It was all right for you, wasn’t it? I know all about it!” 7 Thus, the crucial



49 

question of virginity rests at the center of the parent-child relationship in God of 

Vengeance. Yekel can’t reconcile his own impurities with the original, and later 

stained, purity of his Rivkele. Yekel’s interchangeable use of the terms “virtuous Jewish 

daughter,” “innocent Jewish child,” and “chaste Jewish daughter” demonstrates 

the centrality of virginity in a valuable Jewish womanhood and equates virtue with 

innocence and chastity. Rivkele’s loss of virginity derails her father’s hopes for social 

ascent through marriage and definitively sets her apart from the ideal of Jewish 

womanhood. 

Sarah embodies the contradiction between a sinful past and hope for a 

better, more pure future. 8 Time and again throughout God of Vengeance, Sarah, 

rather than espousing the superstitious potency of actions past, insists on human 

agency, the potential for change, and the power of the present as the defining factors 

in moral purity. Her husband, by contrast, attributes agency to devils and divine 

retribution—among other traditional Yiddish beliefs—when it comes to significant 

events and the purity (or impurity) of his household. For what he sees as the 

accumulation of his family’s yetzer hara (the evil inclination), he blames his lifelong 

work in an indecent profession. Against this accumulation of yetzer hara he feels 

powerless; he denies the potential for any human agency in changing the course of 

one’s life for the better. This juxtaposition of Sarah’s belief in human agency against 

Yekel’s staunch belief in divine destiny and superstitious forces comes across most 

forcefully in the moments following the immaculate Rivkele’s disappearance into 

prostitution and her father’s resulting breakdown. Sarah, speaking as the voice of 

reason, encourages her husband to be proactive in reclaiming his daughter from the 

conniving, aspiring brothel owner Shloyme. She pleads 

Yekel, what’s possessed you? Have you gone crazy? Consider what you’re 

doing. A misfortune has befallen us. To whom don’t misfortunes happen! Come. 

Let us hunt out Shloyme. We’ll give him two or three hundred roubles and let him 

give us back our child. He’ll do it, alright… Well, what are you sitting there moping 

about? What’s the matter with you? 9 

Yekel—unwilling to entertain her hopeful, practical plan—responds 

dejectedly, “It’s all the same to me now. My soul is given over to the devil. Nothing 

will help.” As the play progresses, Yekel insists on his divinely ensured inability 

to rise up out of sin. 10 Yekel’s failed attempt at climbing the Jewish social ladder by 

amassing wealth, purchasing a Holy Scroll, and marrying his daughter to a respected 

scholar results in misery. Despite Sarah’s best efforts, Yekel’s complete mental and 

emotional destruction by the end of the play impart the message that a formerly 

sinful person can never fully achieve holiness or purity. Rather, forces of divine 

retribution, its conclusion implies, will wreak havoc on a fallen person’s attempts at 

achieving a clean slate of morality. 

Other texts also present anxieties surrounding the moral implications of 

social climbing, especially social climbing achieved through illicit sexual liaisons. 

In his “New World Idyll,” Opatoshu presents the overbearing, sexualized landlady, 

Rebecca Bloom, in an undoubtedly negative light. Bloom epitomizes the stereotypical 

Jewish, female antagonist: she is hungry for wealth and material goods, deviates 

from the norm of marital monogamy, and uses her sexual potency to support the 

extravagant life that she craves. While most of the other central female characters 

in these texts are presented with ethical ambiguity, Rebecca’s sexual transgressions 

are inextricably bound up with her moral misbehavior. She ruthlessly extorts 

money from both her alcoholic lover and her blind husband by charming them 

with her sexual appeal, and she shamelessly displays her transgressions in full view 

of the children in her house. This inter-generational display of sexuality is especially 

shocking in contrast to the close attention that the parental characters paid to the 

protection of their progeny’s purity in God of Vengeance. 

In “New World Idyll,” Bloom offends by ignoring expectations both for 

womanhood and for parenthood. At the opening of this short story, Opatoshu presents 

his vision of ideal womanhood through Morris—an alcoholic father to a young 

son, Bloom’s tenant and lover, and the story’s main character—and his hopes for 

his son. Morris reassures his son, “I’ll make a man of you; you’ll have the swellest 

ladies running after you. You won’t have to tag after the street-kind like me.” 11 The 

importance that Morris places in finding a “swell” woman for his son echoes Yekel 

and Sarah in God of Vengeance, and their parallel drive to ensure respectability in 

their children’s future despite their own parental failings. Morris, rather than asserting 

positive female qualities, defines ideal womanhood in opposition to Bloom, the 

woman with whom he is involved but for whom he has no respect. 

Bloom’s marital relationship follows a similar pattern in which sexual allure 

and respectable womanhood are mutually exclusive. Bloom’s husband, Simon, 

offers a biting critique of his unfaithful and avaricious wife. In an extended monologue 

he portrays Bloom as a money-grubbing, inconsiderate witch. He has no 

qualms about calling her a witch, a hussy, and a harlot in response to her adultery, 

disrespect, and money-spending habits. 12 Bloom refuses to swallow his accusations, 

and instead lures him back into submissive complacency. She turns the tables by 

pushing the blame away from herself and onto Simon, accusing him of jealousy, 

insisting on her innocence, and once more cajoling money out of his pockets. Falling 

for her cover up, Simon insists that she will “live like a princess, like a real lady” 

provided she kick out her drunken lover and tenant. Thus, as the arbiter of his family’s 

wealth, Simon pronounces the disassociation between his wife’s ability to “live 

like a princess” and her illegitimate sexual liaisons. Both of Bloom’s relationships, 

with her lover and her cuckolded husband, reveal the impossibility of the coincidence 

of female sexual transgression and male respect. 

Miriam, Sarah, Rivkele, and Bloom each embody the typical Jewish 

female transgression—prohibited sexual activity—and are thus doomed to live 

contemptible lives. They occupy Jewish communities in which they are judged for



51 

their misbehavior itself rather than for its perceived Jewishness or reflection on the 

greater Jewish community. By contrast, Yezierska’s American setting in Salome of 

the Tenements shifts the focus of Jewish women’s behavior onto the ways in which a 

woman’s transgressions might affect the perception of Jews on a larger scale. Though 

Yezierska also places stock in the common stereotype that Opatoshu’s Bloom embodies—that 

of lower-class Jewish women as extravagant, garish embarrassments in 

the face of upper-class beauty and simplicity—she uses this focus not to condemn 

women’s transgressions but to illuminate the class divisions between upper and 

lower class Jews that abounded in early twentieth-century America. 

Sonya, the protagonist of Salome of the Tenements, is an ebullient, secondgeneration 

American girl who longs for beauty and a way out of the grimy ghetto. 13 

Once Sonya uses her impressive and easy charisma to climb the social ladder, however, 

she realizes the full force of the class disconnect between her East Side Jewish 

roots and the blueblood world of New York’s old-money elite. Presented as an 

irreconcilable contrast between the Jewish immigrant, heymish heart and the sterile, 

Anglo-Saxon head, the Downtown-Uptown schism defines and ultimately destroys 

Sonya’s fairytale marriage to the millionaire philanthropist John Manning. 

Sonya treats Manning as her ticket to upward social mobility. In the first 

chapter, titled “Salome Meets Her Saint,” Yezierska repeatedly employs religious imagery 

to depict Sonya’s zeal for the upper crust of Manhattan society. Upon her first 

interaction with her future husband, the WASP-y John Manning, Sonya focuses 

on “his low voice of cultured restraint,” and his “formal manner—his unconscious 

air of superiority” that “roused in her the fire of worship.” 14 Indeed, Manning and 

Sonya play out the Protestant trope of salvation throughout their relationship. 

Sonya plays into Manning’s self-fashioned philanthropic heroism by positioning 

herself as someone in need of “saving” from the distasteful, garish aesthetics of 

the East Side. Together, Manning convinces her, they can save the ghetto from its 

uncivilized grime and squalid poverty. After their first encounter, Sonya sees signs of 

the ghetto’s poverty everywhere. Following her quasi-religious experience with Manning, 

she returns to her apartment and notices, as if for the first time, 

Wedged in, jumbled shops and dwellings, pawnshops and herringstalls, 

strained together begging for elbow room. Across the alley a 

second-hand store protruded its rubbish. Broken stoves, beds, threelegged 

chairs sprawled upon the sidewalk. The unspeakable cheapness 

of a dry goods shop flared in her face … From the crowded 

windows hung dirty mattresses and bedding—flaunting banners of 

poverty. She slammed the window with a crash. “God from the world! 

How did I stand all this till now?” The grimy walls of her little room 

pressed in upon her—suffocated her. “An end to darkness and dirt! 

I’ve found my deliverer! Already I’m released from the blackness of 

this poverty. Air, space, the mountain-tops of life are already mine!’ ”15 

Once exposed to the majesty of upper-class life, Sonya cannot bear her cramped 

surroundings. She treats her beau-to-be as more than a romantic interest, elevating 

him to a pedestal of divine beneficence and regarding him as a champion capable of 

delivering her from ghetto life. 

Yezierska’s Sonya lives a narrative opposite to those of the fallen women in 

the other stories reviewed. She rises up from poverty and frustration into a fantasy 

world of Christian wealth, only to reject it and achieve a compromise that maintains 

ties with her Jewish roots while embracing a lucrative career of beauty and 

high art as a fashion designer. Once Sonya has risen up out of poverty, she focuses 

her attention on lifting up other, less fortunate East Side Jews. Thus Anzierska’s 

story is especially valuable in displaying the two dominant types of Jewish women 

in early twentieth-century American literature: the ambitious, dramatic “Ghetto 

Girl” ready to go to great lengths to climb the social ladder through marriage, and 

the established, wealthy, assimilated American Jew, already distant from her immigrant 

roots and eager to separate herself from the lower-class, recently immigrated 

Jews who might taint her reputation. 16 This latter category of established Jewish 

American women often turned to Jewish philanthropy. This philanthropy, directed 

at Jewish women in particular, helped establish the public personas of these philanthropists 

as generous and wealthy citizens concerned for the well-being of their 

communities. Simultaneously it reformed those Jews with a record of, or potential 

for, criminality: those who attracted negative attention to Jews generally. 

In the often anti-Semitic world of early twentieth-century New York City, 

any offense committed by a Jew in the public eye had the potential to affect mainstream 

non-Jewish society’s perception of even the most Americanized, established 

Jew. In her study of the “Ghetto Girl,” Riv-Ellen Prell explores the reasons why 

“fallen women” or even non-deviant lower-class women (who had the potential, 

as outsiders saw it, to stray from the path of respectable American womanhood) 

struck fear into the hearts of both the American Jewish and gentile Establishment. 

She notes that the material extravagance popular on the East Side among lower 

class Jews posed the biggest threat to upper-class Jewish women. A taste for material 

fineries, they feared, would likely lead to crime and indecency should girls become 

unable to afford the extravagant fashions of the time on their low salaries alone. 

Prell writes, 

By contrast [to the bourgeois model of assimilated Jewish American womanhood], 

the Ghetto Girl’s taste was far too conspicuous; she was betrayed 

by the cheapness of what she had and wore. She was loud and public and 

immodest. Her wages financed her own excess, making her autonomous 

and out of the control of the family. The Ghetto Girl stereotype integrated 

Jews’ anxieties about their differences from Americans with Americans’ fears 

of invasion by non Anglo-Saxons who violated America’s cultural purity. 17



53 

Thus, Prell argues, bourgeois Yiddish communities encouraged East 

Side Jewish women to adopt a set of traditionally Protestant American values that 

might fend off a descent into delinquency. These supposedly American convictions 

were rooted in the Protestant tradition of simplicity and industrious modesty and 

lauded a new Jewish American womanhood predicated on “modesty, simplicity, and 

circumspect behavior.” 18 Sonya’s adventures and misadventures in navigating this 

new American Jewish womanhood reside at the center of Salome of the Tenements. 

The compromise at which she ultimately arrives, a mixture of upper-class emphasis 

on simplicity and beauty with traditionally Jewish warmth and feeling, provides one 

prototype for Jewish American women striving to simultaneously assimilate, maintain 

their roots, and avoid the transgressive stereotype of delinquent Jewish women 

that pervaded the cultural production of the period. 

Texts with settings in which Jews were a minority concerned themselves 

particularly with the perception that gentiles held toward Jews. In Asch, Hirschbein, 

and Opatoshu, the events take place in unspecified or explicitly Eastern 

European Jewish communities. Thus, these stories deal less with the possibility that 

transgressive womanhood might affect public perception of Jews and more with the 

personal repercussions, family consequences, and social exile resulting from female 

immorality. While these three texts offer important insights into common expectations 

for and deviations from Jewish womanhood, Anzierska’s novel provides the 

most pointed study of Jewish women’s identity formation and transgression in the 

early twentieth century. 

The new, chaotic world that Jews entered in America offered both danger 

and possibility. It presented radical new freedoms to escape violence, discrimination, 

and old religious and social rules, and a simultaneous freedom to fail, starve, 

and misbehave in a foreign environment. Even success had liabilities, as it allowed 

assimilation that might threaten the survival of Jewish religion, culture, and community. 

While Old World literature focuses discussions of female transgressions 

internally, overlooking the judgment of the outside world, American literary texts 

consider actions in a wider context. Reputation always mattered, as seen in these 

stories, but the criteria for evaluating female propriety and impropriety altered 

along with changing conceptions of Jewish womanhood in a new land. 

Notes 

1 Illicit sex took many forms between 1900-1920. In this paper, “illicit sex” refers to prostitution, 

adultery, and sex before marriage. 

2 Peretz Hirschbein, Miriam, in Landmark Yiddish Plays, ed. and trans. Joel Berkowitz and 

Jeremy Dauber (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2006), 272. 

3 Hirschbein, Miriam, 279. 




7 Sholom Asch, God of Vengeance, trans. Isaac Goldberg (Boston: The Stratford Co. Publish- 

ers, 1918), 92-93. 

8 This contradiction pervades the psyches of “fallen women” in the literature of this era. 

9 Asch, God of Vengeance, 72 

10 Throughout, he repeats the phrases “Into the brothel with everything,” “No more holy 

scroll,” and “God won’t have it.” 

11 Joshua Opatoshu, “New Word Idyll,” The Pagan, No. 6-7, Vol. II (1917): 4. 

12 Opatoshu, “New Word Idyll,” 11. 

13 It is also noteworthy that Yezierska presents her story from Sonya’s perspective. 

14 Yezierska, Salome of the Tenements, 1. 

15 Yezierska, Salome of the Tenements, 5. 

16 Sonya combines the two types in her transition from an East Side greenhorn to a successful, 

assimilated American, her upward mobility facilitated by marriage. This trope is not 

unique to Jewish literature. This same narrative famously dominates Sister Carrie, a serialized 

novel by Theodore Dreiser and published to great acclaim in 1900, a quarter century before 

Salome of the Tenements. The eponymous heroine of Sister Carrie is not Jewish or European, 

but enters the city from the countryside as a wide-eyed novice, uses relationships to advance, 

but actually succeeds ultimately through her own talents and sheds her partners (who she 

doesn’t actually marry, leaving her a morally ambiguous figure). This narrative is strikingly 

similar to Sonya’s journey of upward mobility and identity formation in Salome of the Tenements. 

17 Riv-Ellen Prell, Fighting to Become Americans: Jews, Gender, and the Anxiety of Assimilation 

(Boston: Beacon Press, 1999), 29. 

18 Prell, Fighting to Become Americans, 43.



The skimmers amongst you will be disappointed that I cannot say which of 

the three sections of this piece is the more interesting or important. The advocates of 

the here-are-my-ideas-politely-and-coldly-presented-in-a-one-sentence-thesis sort of 

introduction are already annoyed. Those of you with generosity and patience—those 

of you who have read this far—will allow me the indulgence of a minor confession: 

writing and publishing this piece has been cathartic and invigorating. Some of the 

thoughts contained herein are, for me, old enough that their publication is a sort of 

purification and purgation. Some are much, much newer. Thinking and writing these 

newer ideas has been exhilarating and anxious. Thank you for reading. 

It is not from aesthetic preference or a desire to exasperate that I have left a 

neat thesis statement out of this piece; rather, it is because this piece is very much a 

series of three articles with three related but independent arguments. Though I think 

that each section helps support and explain the others, I do not think that all readers 

will find the three equally interesting or compelling. In the first section I put forth 

a description of great art. This kind of art is characterized by a unity of organization 

and, simultaneously, an infinity of meaning. In the second section, I will show that 

the Joseph story in particular and biblical narrative in general achieve this sort of 

greatness. This discussion will help me identify a characteristically Biblical manner of 

storytelling. A story told in this manner seems to have many endings but never truly 

ends. In the third section I will argue that the Bible demands that its Jewish audience 

conceive of itself as partaking in the Biblical narrative—that they live biblically. 

I hope that the discussion of great art will provide a theoretical context for 

the Joseph narrative and that this narrative—as an example—will help to explain 

these theories. The discovery of a Biblical manner of storytelling, which also helps to 

make the Bible great art, will be crucial to the argument that the serious contemporary 

reader of the Bible cannot remain at a distance from the narrative. 

I: Great Art 

We commonly speak of some art as great; in this section, I try to give some 

thoughtful content to this tendency. Later, I will investigate the relationship between 

this understanding of art and the Bible. To argue that the Bible is great art, however, 

I must first put forth a description—for I shrink from a definition—of great art. The 

adjective “great” is appropriate here because I believe that, in some way, all art should 

aim to realize these characteristics. Nevertheless, to avoid writing an art-theoretical 

treatise I will forgo a detailed defense of my use of the term “great.” Rather, I will put 

forth an account of this artistic greatness in order that it enrich the following reading 


of the Joseph story and so that the Joseph story may become a useful, compelling, and 

specific example of this theory. 

By “great” art I refer to art that has two related characteristics: 1) it always 

seems to have a simple and unified organization and 2) while finite it has an infinity 

of meaning. 1 In other words, great art seems to contain a mysterious infinity while 

also always seeming to have a simple, unified, and defining principle of organization. 

Perhaps an example is in order. The Mona Lisa seems to stand definitively 

for greatness in art, so it will serve well to make my meaning clear. The Mona Lisa 

is a painting of a woman with a half-smile sitting in front of a window that looks 

over mountains and lakes. This description roughly accounts for all of the details of 

the painting, but it completely fails to account for its greatness. Though it is just an 

imitation of the body of a woman, the painting conveys a rich subjective experience. 

A sitting human is not just a collection of nerves, muscles, and bones in a seated position: 

it is a being with an interior life. A sitting woman is a sitting, thinking, feeling, 

imagining, and reasoning being. But just as other humans convince us of their consciousness 

through their actions and wistful smiles, Mona Lisa—a masterly collection 

of brush-strokes on a canvas representing a woman with a half-smile—convinces us 

of her consciousness. 2 This is indeed a mystery, and one that defies the finitude of the 

painting’s frame and the viewer’s description. For insofar as the painting evinces consciousness 

it cannot be circumscribed by description. Describing someone as having 

an interior life is like describing a spaceship as a piece of metal: it misses the point, 

the complexity, and the beauty. It is like referring to the Cinque-Terre Trail on Italy’s 

northwestern coast as “a hike.” The art seems at once an instrument whose purpose 

is to represent a sitting woman and an actual woman who is in no way instrumental. 

Thus, the greatness of this painting, I think, comes from its simultaneous adherence 

to and defiance of simple description. In fact, it is the simple description itself—in 

this case usually the smile—that seems to point us beyond this description. 3 

There are many ways in which unity of organization and infinity of meaning 

can come to be in a piece of art, but these characteristics of great art always seem 

to stand in tension. I’ll try to draw out the necessity of this tension. If one can decisively 

refer to the meaning of a piece of art, if it can be expressed as a single thought 

or as a set of thoughts, then the art is no greater than this group of thoughts. Though 

these thoughts can certainly be important, even revolutionary, once they are studied, 

understood, and remembered the art has no more to give. Its meaning is exhausted. 4 

This is not great art. The trouble and mystery is that great art always seems to be simply 

organized. There seems to be a necessity to every element of great art—nothing 

is extra and nothing is missing. But this necessity suggests a unity of organization, a 

unifying principle or purpose. Thus the viewer interprets: “It must be organized in 

this way in order to … ” The viewer must define the art, must give a meaning. How, 

then, can great art be characterized by infinite meaning as well as unity? How can it 

be both ungraspable and evince a sense of organization? 

55

56 MAKOM Gabriel Shapiro 


57 

It seems to me that if we are to agree that great art cannot be subject to 

definition or synopsis and that great art must evince unity, then it must always seem 

organized in a way that itself points the audience to a higher organization within the 

art. This later unity will itself point to a new unity. Thus a first description of the 

Mona Lisa draws attention to the smile—it is the smile that is mysterious. But Mona 

Lisa’s smile points to her interiority and her interiority points to the real mystery of 

the painting. Each attempt at picking the meaning out of great art bears new fruit— 

new insight, inspiration, and understanding of the art—but also proclaims that what 

looks like the fruit of a wild apple tree really hangs from a tree in a row of a beautiful 

grove of apple trees. 5 This new organization also suggests anew a purposefulness but 

will in turn reveal itself to be merely a part of a larger unity. Thus each moment yields 

a sense of self-sufficient unity, but calls us towards a larger unity. 

If this account is worth anything as a theory of great art, its applications are 

far-ranging and its uses many. As members of the Makom community—and by reading 

this piece you most certainly are that—we are interested in this theory as it relates 

to Jewish thought, and certainly the Bible. 

II: The Story of Joseph and His Brothers, and His Mother, and His Aunt, and 

His Father… 

Though there are other examples of great art, and likely others that achieve 

this greatness in a manner similar to that of the Bible, it is nevertheless striking that 

the Joseph story fits the category so exactly. As is true of all stories, the framing of this 

story—its beginning and its end—is essential in grasping the story’s organization and 

assigning it meaning. In the Joseph story each framing, while intelligible, interesting, 

and important, calls for its own reframing. Each time we try to begin and end 

the Joseph story, we are pointed towards another beginning and another ending. In 

this way, each of these reframings challenges the reader’s previous understanding of 

the story. Thus we have an example of great art, and thus we discover an important 

feature of the biblical manner of storytelling. 

So let’s begin with the most obvious synopsis of the Joseph saga: Joseph is 

born to Jacob and Rachel. While still in his youth, he finds himself without a mother 

and the favorite of his father. 6 His brothers are jealous and he is rash. 7 Out of jealousy 

they nearly murder him but instead sell him into slavery. 8 He finds himself a 

slave in the house of an important Egyptian. He is blessed by God and beautiful; his 

master’s wife tries to seduce him, and, failing, contrives his downfall. 9 He is sent to 

prison where he interprets the dreams of disgraced officials. 10 This interpretive ability 

leads to his ascent to the position of vizier to Pharaoh. 11 A famine rages and Joseph 

manages the country’s agriculture. 12 Soon his brothers, living in Canaan and in need 

of food, come to him for aid but fail to recognize their brother. 13 He withholds his 

identity while making their lives miserable—he has a silver goblet planted in their 

luggage in order to throw Benjamin in jail and send the other brothers home to their 

father Jacob, who has lost another son of Rachel. 14 Finally, Judah confronts him. 

Joseph, overwhelmed by emotion, reveals his identity. The brothers are reunited and 

the whole family moves to Egypt under the protective power of Joseph, the vizier. 15 

This is a story of brothers mistreating each other, but, with the help of God, 

reuniting and reconstituting a family. It is a story of repentance and maturation: the 

same brothers who were so angry with the young, arrogant Joseph confront the vizier 

of Egypt to save Rachel’s younger son, Benjamin. Reading the story theologically, 

one sees in Joseph a remarkable trust in God and in his troubles the dangers of arrogance 

and jealousy. His brothers teach the reader that repentance and forgiveness 

can re-knit even the most deeply rent of family fabrics. Here we have another, though 

a more fully developed, Cain and Abel story. 16 But in this reliving of the mythic 

fraternal hatred, Jacob’s sons manage, with God’s aid, to overcome their murderous 

impulses and emerge as a united family. However neat, this synopsis of the story is 

misleadingly unified: this formulation of the story-unit seems much more solid than 

it is. 

To understand the story of Joseph and his brothers, one must at least recognize 

the contentions between Rachel and Leah. 17 Robert Alter suggests that Rachel’s 

defining characteristics are her rivalry with her sister together with her deep desire to 

bear children. 18 He places particular emphasis on Rachel’s first speech, which reads 

as follows: 

And Rachel saw that she had borne no children to Jacob, and Rachel was 

jealous of her sister, and she said to Jacob, “Give me sons, for if you don’t, 

I’m a dead woman!” And Jacob was incensed with Rachel and he said, 

“Am I instead of God, Who has denied you fruit of the womb?” 19 

Jacob is perhaps correct to deny having the power to give Rachel sons, but his lack 

of compassion for his wife here is striking. Instead of taking her pain seriously, he 

admonishes her theological crudity. Jacob does not address Rachel’s problem and it 

becomes his: soon Rachel’s desire for sons and her jealously of Leah becomes a rift. 

The naming of Naphtali, the second son born to Jacob and Bilhah, Rachel’s servant, 

provides a concise and telling description of the sisters’ relationship: “And Rachel 

said, ‘In awesome grapplings I have grappled with my sister and yes, I won out.’ And 

she called his name Naphtali.” 20 Foremost in Rachel’s mind, even at such a moment, 

is her rivalry with Leah. 

In the last chapter of Genesis, more than twenty chapters after Jacob’s rebuke 

of Rachel, the language of this rebuke returns to the reader. The brothers’ reconciliation 

after Judah’s daring speech was not as complete as it seemed at first. A few 

chapters after their initial reunion and after Jacob’s death, the brothers fear Joseph’s 

revenge. They decide to lie to him once more, telling him that Jacob had charged 

Joseph to forgive his brothers their crime. 21 Then we have



59 

And Joseph wept when they spoke to him. And his brothers then 

came and flung themselves before him and said, “Here we are, 

your slaves.” And Joseph said, “Fear not, for am I instead of God?” 22 

This pair of phrases is unique in the Hebrew Bible. Nowhere else do the words “am 

I instead of God?” appear. 23 The second instance is a reversal of the first. Rather than 

responding with anger towards his brothers, Joseph promises to care for them. Jacob 

refuses to fulfill his wife’s deepest needs and imputes to her the crime of unreasonable, 

perhaps heretical, demands; Joseph provides for his brothers’ emotional need for 

forgiveness and absolves them of their actual crime. Furthermore, it is these brothers 

that caused Joseph’s slavery—and now they offer themselves as slaves to him. 24 It is 

only at this moment that the family truly comes together. This, I think, is a clear indication 

that the fraternal rivalry was an extension of the rivalry between Rachel and 

Leah. These are not two stories, but one: the brothers’ rivalry is only a symptom of 

a larger pathology. Only here is their mothers’ rivalry overcome and only here is the 

crime of kidnapping openly addressed. The reader is thus forced to reframe the story 

to begin with the sister’ rivalry and end with the end of the book. 

With the parallelism of these two verses the story suggests another narrative 

frame for itself and thereby another organization and meaning. The story is not simply 

of brothers but of a family in disorder. Only with the reordering and reuniting of 

the family can the story close. Yet it is a strange close. Under this framing, our story 

is an introduction to the story of slavery and redemption in Exodus. This paper is not 

the place for an extended treatment of the theme of slavery in the Joseph story, but 

such a treatment is possible and important. Certainly, the children of Israel offering 

themselves as slaves to the vizier of Egypt cannot fail to recall to the reader’s mind the 

enslavement and redemption story that begins in the Bible’s next book. Furthermore, 

Joseph’s promise to his brothers—that God will return them to their fathers’ land— 

becomes a central element of the Exodus story. 25 So the Joseph story reframes itself as 

a story of transition between a fractured family and a whole people. This framing of 

the story suggests that familyhood can only be healthy and complete with empathy 

and trust. Furthermore, it seems that the rivalry between Rachel and Leah needed to 

be addressed before the family could become a people. And it is only the complete, 

unified, and healthy family of Jacob that can become the chosen People of Israel. 

This framing of the story again wavers upon closer inspection, and again it 

is a scene within the story-unit that suggests its incompleteness. This time the episode 

in question is that of the divining goblet. In this scene, Joseph commands his servant 

to plant money and a silver goblet in his brothers’ saddlebags and then to chase them 

down and accuse them of theft. 26 A number of scholars have noted that this episode 

recalls another “stolen” treasure, hidden in another saddlebag. 27 There are indeed 

remarkable similarities between this episode and the story in Chapter XXXI in which 

Rachel steals her father’s teraphim, or household gods. 28 

Let’s compare these stories: in each narrative the story starts with Jacob’s 

family leaving for Canaan; the stolen object is used for divination; the object is hidden 

in a saddlebag; a group pursues and catches the suspects; the “victim,” also a 

member of the family, confronts and accuses the suspects; the suspects categorically 

deny guilt and swear to their innocence on pain of death; a search is conducted ending 

with the finding of the stolen object; and, eventually, both stories end in peace 

making. 

The language of these stories provides further evidence that at the heart of 

both episodes the same pathology afflicts the family. In the second episode, however, 

the beginnings of the family’s recovery are already apparent. These scenes share some 

uncommon phrasings: 

• Both stories are dominated by semantically related word-roots: 

g.n.v., the root for theft, appears four times in the teraphim scene 

and the root k.s.f. for silver appears five times in the goblet scene. 29 

• Also. each scene plays off the other with a reference to the other’s 

word root. In the goblet scene, the brothers use the root g.n.v. in 

their denial and in the teraphim story Laban uses a play on k.s.f 

in his accusation. 30 

• In both scenes a reference to wrongdoing is made with a similar 

and uncommon phrase. Laban, in the midst of his accusations, 

strangely quotes God as telling him “watch yourself, lest you speak 

to Jacob either good or evil.” Joseph charges his servant to ask his 

brothers, “Why have you paid back evil for good?” 31 

• The verb for chasing—r.d.f.—appears in both. 32 

• The verb sequence “and he searched … he found” is in both. 33 

• The brothers echo their father’s response to Laban’s accusation of 

theft. Jacob says, “With whomever you find your gods, that person 

shall not live,” and years later the brothers tell Joseph’s servant 

that “he of your servants with whom it be found shall die.” 34 

All of these details are significantly and consistently changed in the second 

story—in fact, they are reversed. While in the Laban story “he searched and did not 

find,” Joseph’s servant “searched … and found” in the Goblet story. 35 This is, simply, 

the linguistic representation of the reversal in the narrative. Also, in the former story, 

we have “good or evil” and in the latter, “evil for good.” God’s words to Laban, I 

think, might even have made more sense as “evil or good”—for once speaking good is 

prohibited certainly speaking evil is as well—thus, the reversal in order can be taken 

as significant. In the two stories, the punishment promised is the same but phrased 

once negatively and once positively: “shall not live,” in the first and “will die” in the 

second. 36 Last, while it is the chaser who is deceived in the first story, the chaser is 

himself the deceiver in the second. 

I think that the striking narrative and linguistic linkages between the scenes 

suggest that these two stories of family discord share a pathology—the shape and



61 

behavior of the problem is the same. As the reversals show, these two scenes are at 

opposite ends of the problem. While they are both stories of family strife, the earlier 

scene with Laban suggests that Jacob’s family has mismanaged the situation and created 

lasting problems for itself. The later scene, on the other hand, seems to manifest 

the moment at which the family’s wounds begin to heal. This inverted parallelism will 

again reframe our reading, but this time it casts the shadow of the figure of Laban and 

of deceit upon the family’s story. 37 

Upon inspection, the teraphim scene is really more about Laban and Jacob 

than about Rachel and Leah. 38 Thus it is reasonable to read the connection between 

the scenes as a connection between the two pursuers and deceivers, Joseph and Laban. 

On this reading, the Joseph story is brought together with the deceit that surrounds 

Laban throughout. If this connection is viable, then it is likely that deceit is 

at the heart of the family’s problem. The discord surrounding Joseph and his brothers 

is recast in terms of even broader family problems than those of rivalry. This theory 

becomes more plausible when one notes that though it is Laban who is the most 

unambiguous representative of the theme of deceit, he is not the only character to 

engage in it. Rachel steals the teraphim, Joseph plays his brothers with the goblet and 

his identity, and the brothers lie to Jacob about Joseph’s death. Jacob misleads his 

father, cheats his brother, and sneaks out on Laban. The deception here is, indeed, 

pathological. Though at points Abraham’s descendents had to choose between lying 

or dying, somewhere in the story the family developed a very troubling penchant 

for trickery. Thus Judah’s courageous, open, and honest speech before the Egyptian 

vizier, Joseph, is comprehensible as a moment of healing. Joseph reveals his identity. 

The family has taken a great step forwards. 

Here again the margins of the story waver. The goblet-teraphim parallelism 

suggests a broader view of the story and one that includes Jacob’s youth in Isaac’s 

house. The family must learn to deal with its problems openly, and with direct speech 

rather than through cleverness and trickery. Though deceit can serve a purpose, it has 

its own dangers. 

Each recasting of the story and each internal linkage creates a new “whole” 

for the reader to grasp and assess, new material to know and understand. Each new 

whole itself has an organization and meaning. These linkages and their power to create 

meaning are not confined to recasting the beginnings and ends of stories, but link 

middles and weave a complex web of self-reference—intertextuality between stories 

and intratextuality within stories—that seems to extend infinitely. 

Thus we find in Biblical literature a particular instance of great art. Here 

we have a literature that gestures beyond itself and reframes its own narrative. Each 

successive reframing provides an importantly different understanding of the art. Just 

as these linkages seem infinite, the meanings and reframings that correspond to them 

seem to be infinite. Yet within each framing, the story has a definite and graspable 

meaning, one that is not lost in synopsis. This greatness can be evident even within 

a small section by internal linkages. The relevant phenomenon for this paper is the 

reframing of the narrative arc of the story. 

The story of Joseph and his brothers is a useful example of greatness of art. 

The Bible, like the Mona Lisa, demands thinking and rethinking, ever evincing an 

organizing principle but never fully grasped. Both leave one with an uncertain sense 

of a certain purposefulness and meaning. The manner in which the Bible attains this 

greatness is itself interesting: the endings and the beginnings of biblical story-units 

are not as solid as they appear. This observation will be crucial for the next section. 

III: The Politics of an Unending Story 

It should be evident at this point that a piece of art can achieve greatness in 

many ways. In this section, I hope to convince you that the biblical mode of artistic 

greatness described in the last section—manifest in the phenomenon of the wavering 

and expanding arc of Biblical narrative—conditions a sort of reading that draws even 

the twenty-first-century American reader into the Biblical narrative. I think that by 

reading in this way, the contemporary reader’s distance from the text vanishes; this 

reader becomes, as it were, a character in the story. 

First a word on contemporary distance from the text: I think that one can 

appreciate the moral, political, and theological meanings of the Bible and still remain 

at an important distance from the text. One can study the Bible and study it seriously, 

even piously, without living biblically. That is, a pious reader need not conceive himself 

has part of the story. While one may enjoy or admire the complexity of linkages 

in the narrative or glean politico-religious meaning from this manner of story telling, 

the reading is ultimately distant. I want to suggest that the ideal Jewish reader cannot 

maintain such a distance from the biblical narrative. This suggests a different relationship 

between the audience of these narratives and the text. 

To say that the Bible demands the Jewish people’s participation in the biblical 

story is not a new claim. Amidst the commandment to celebrate Passover—a 

commandment to be kept “when the Lord brings you to the land … ”—the Bible 

commands: “You shall tell your son on that day, saying, ‘For the sake of what the 

Lord did to me when I went out of Egypt.’” 39 It seems that in retelling the narrative of 

the Jewish Exodus, one is to place oneself into the past, into the story. The Mishnah 

picks up this reading in Tractate Pesahim. Citing this verse, the Talmud decrees that 

“In every generation a man is obligated to see himself as if he left Egypt.” 40 In Deuteronomy, 

Moses addresses those about to enter the Land of Israel, many of whom were 

presumably born in the desert and who had never lain eyes on Egypt: “… You have 

seen all that the Lord did before your eyes in the land of Egypt to Pharaoh and to all 

his servants and to all his land, the great trials that your own eyes have seen, those 

great signs and portents.” 41 This is, literally, not true. In both of these instances the 

historical reality bends under the pressure of religious imperative. For God’s covenant 

is made with those present and those yet to be. Moses tells the people, “And not with



63 

you alone do I seal this covenant and this oath but with him who is here standing 

with us this day before the Lord our God and with him who is not here with us this 

day.” 42 

The special divine authority with which the Bible speaks lends a sense of 

imperative to its narrative. The Biblical narrator relates the creation of the cosmos 

and the prophecy of God. Moreover, this narrator commands; the Bible claims the 

authority of the divine lawgiver. The divine authority of the narrator lends a sense 

of necessity to the narrative. It must itself be fulfilled. Indeed, as we saw, the Bible 

demands explicitly that the Jewish reader see him- or herself as part of the story and 

particularly the story of the Exodus. 

Beyond the Bible’s explicit command to enter the narrative, the Bible’s particular 

artistic greatness conditions a reading incompatible with a sense of historical 

distance from the story. The manner of storytelling in which the Bible creates an 

infinity of meanings leads one to read the document as a whole in the same way one 

reads each of its episodes: one doubts that the ending is truly final. As the ending of 

the Joseph saga wavers and takes on new meaning, the Bible conditions a form of 

reading that does not respect endings. Endings in the Bible are not solid; there is no 

denouement but only the beginning of the next episode. 43 

Locating the end of the Bible is itself a complicated endeavor. A case can 

be made that the end of II Kings is the concluding episode of the Bible’s continuous 

narrative. After II Kings there are isolated, though important, narratives, as well as 

a good deal of prophesy, poetry, parable, and psalm. So, it makes some sense to take 

the end of II Kings as the Bible’s natural conclusion. Indeed, there are a number of 

indications that the national story which seems so central to the five books of Moses 

and to the early prophets has come to a crashing, disheartening end. The great 

political achievements of the nation, the building of the Temple, the conquering of 

the Land of Israel, the formation of the nation, and the Exodus from Egypt, are all 

undone. The Temple is destroyed, the sovereignty is lost, the nation is scattered and 

survivors flee to Egypt. 44 

Nevertheless, the Bible’s manner of telling stories challenges any sense of 

dénouement at the conclusion of Kings. Readers are, by this time, accustomed to 

reframing and rereading the Biblical narrative. For this reader, any Biblical frame 

is suspect, any solid ending questioned. The tendency for endings to be beginnings 

for the Biblical narrative suggests that this ending too is a beginning. With this sort 

of reading, no ending can stand between the reader and the narrative. Our twentyfirst-century 

American life becomes, according to the Bible itself, part of the Biblical 

narrative. 

The narrative demands its reader’s involvement. The Joseph story is not just 

a founding myth explaining the origins and drawing together the Jews, but it is related 

in the voice of command. It does convey meaning, though its meanings are infinite. 

It evinces purpose and refuses synopsis; it is highly organized but not reducible 

to its parts. This is also true of the Biblical narrative in general. The divine command 

changes the nature of the narrative, the characteristic unframeability of the stories 

make the Bible great art, and both draw the reader into the story. The Bible makes 

more than a truth-claim: it commands and conditions a frame of mind. Furthermore, 

its artistic greatness derives from the very manner of storytelling that also conditions 

this frame of mind. Belief in the Bible as a national founding myth is not sufficient: 

the ideal reader of the Bible must make himself a part of the story. 

Notes 

1 Actually, I think that great art has a third characteristic: 3) it justifies its own existence. I’ve 

left this out because I a real investigation of this characteristic would complicate this piece 

sufficiently to prevent including sections II and III. In short, I think, is an outcome of the 

second principle or characteristic. Great art can’t simply be valuable because it conforms 

to some external standard of valuation because in such a case its meaning would be definitive—as 

an example of that standard. Thus also, it also doesn’t depend on any standard of 

instrumentality for its existence as an object. While I was just beginning to write this section, 

Aaron Halper, AB 2012, referred me to the first part of Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgment. 

I think that many of the ideas in this section can be found in some form there, but 

I decided that for the purposes of this article a lengthy discussion of Kant’s aesthetics was 

inappropriate. 

2 The obvious difference is that we have much more evidence to think that the human bodies 

surrounding us have consciousness—they speak, for instance. But, the point stands that 

Leonardo Da Vinci really has created something convincingly conscious here. 

3 Irad Kimhi, who is a visiting professor in The Committee on Social Thought, suggested a 

version of this understanding of “great art” in his class on Hamlet in Spring 2012. 

4 In terms of the third characteristic of great art (see note 1): the physical work of art—for 

art must exist physically—would have merely instrumental value and would be justified 

only insofar as the work’s purpose fit with some externally justifying standard of value. Some 

twentieth-century movements, such as Conceptualism or the performance art movement, 

might contest the proposition that art must exist physically; nevertheless, the point that the 

art would be externally justified stands. 

5 This metaphor is misleading if one forgets that the viewer sees the entire work of art at 

once—the grasping of another organization is not merely an expansion of the viewer’s field of 

vision. 

6 The context of Joseph’s birth is fraught: as I will discuss later, Rachel and Leah are already in 

the midst of a heated rivalry (see Gen 30:1 and 30:14-16). Furthermore, Joseph’s birth coincides 

with a familial upheaval: “And it happened, when Rachel bore Joseph, that Jacob said 

to Laban, ‘Send me off, that I may go to my place and to my land’” (Gen 30:25-6; unless 

otherwise specified, I will be using Robert Alter, trans., The Five Books of Moses, trans. Robert 

Alter [New York: W. W. Norton and Co. , 2004]). Here already, Joseph’s birth is a pivotal 

and contentious moment in the family’s politics. Rachel’s death is described at 35:16-20 and 

Joseph is described as his father’s favorite at 37:3. 

7 Gen 37:4-5 

8 Gen 37:19-29



65 

9 Gen 39:1-20 

10 Gen 40:1-13 & 16-22 

11 Gen 41:1-45 

12 Gen 41:47-9 & 54-7 

13 Gen 42:1-8 

14 Gen 42:9-23 & 44:1-17 

15 Gen 44:18-45:20 & 47:1-4 

16 Cf. Gen 4:1-16 

17 I am not claiming at this point that one must consider the Rachel-Leah rivalry as an organic 

part of the Joseph-unit. That claim will be made and defended soon. 

18 “It is a general principle of biblical narrative that a character’s first recorded speech has 

particular defining force as characterization” (Alter, page 158 note 1). 

19 Gen 30:1-2 (my emphasis). 

20 Gen 30: 8. The name “Naftali” is etymologically related to the words rendered by Alter as 

“grappled” and “won out.” 

21 Gen 50:15-17. 

22 Gen 50: 17-19 (my emphasis). 

23 In truth, even these two are not exactly the same. Jacob uses the word anochi for his first 

person subject while Joseph uses ani. On the other hand word hatachat only appears three 

times in the whole of the Hebrew Bible, with the third instance in Samuel II 19:22, and only 

in these two places meaning “instead of” or “in the place of.” 

24 This fulfills the dream that started all the drama! 

25 Cf. Gen 50 25 and Ex 3:15-6, 4:31, & 13:19. 

26 Cf. Gen 44:5 and the Ibn Ezra’s or Alter’s commentary for a discussion of the “divining.” 

27 Yair Zakovitch and Victor P. Hamilton have already noted the extensive parallels that I’ll 

be discussing between the stolen “divining goblet” narrative in chapter 44 and Lavan’s pursuit 

and search for his stolen teraphim in chapter 31. Yair Zakovitch, Through the Looking Glass: 

Reflection Stories in the Bible (Tel Aviv: Hakkibutz Hameuhad Publishing House, 1995) pages 

18-19; Victor P. Hamilton, The Book of Genesis, Chapters 18-50 (Grand Rapids, MI: William 

B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1995) pages 302 and 562-4. 

28 Cf. Gen 31:19 and Alter’s note there. 

29 Also, the root g.z.l. for robbery appears once. 

30 Gen 44:8 and 31:30 respectively. The word in the teraphim scene is nikhsaf which looks 

and sounds of kesef. 

31 Gen 31:30 and 44:4 (my emphasis). Alter renders the Hebrew ra as evil and tov as good 

32 Gen 31:23 and 44:4 

33 Gen 31:35 and 44:12 

34 Gen 44:9 and 31:32 

35 Gen 31:35 and 44:12. 

36 It is important to note that in neither of these scenes is the punishment carried out. 

37 Yair Zakovitch suggests that the story of Benjamin’s accusation and near imprisonment is a 

punishment for his mother’s theft of the teraphim and deceit of her father (Zakovitch, page 

19). Thus, perhaps, Rachel’s wrongdoing is finally being undone, reversed. Though a certain 

level of criticism of Rachel here is undeniable, I think that this explanation is a bit farfetched. 

For one, Rachel has already died in childbirth. Indeed, if we need to impute a punishment 

for Rachel, it would be quite plausible that her deception, which centered on her fertility (see 

31:35), would be punished with a fault of fertility. 

38 Though Rachel precipitates the misunderstanding, she is not responsible for her father’s 

mistreatment of Jacob or her husband’s decision to flee. 

39 Ex 13:4,8. (The emphasis is mine). 

40 Chapter 10 mishna 5, and in the Talmud on 116b. This is my translation. 

41 Deut 29:1 

42 Deut 29:13-4 

43 I think that historical narrative is closely analogous to Biblical narrative. As narratives, both 

depend on a beginning, middle, and end to tell a story but both refuse this simple framing. 

History is too complex to capture fully in such a form, the causal story is always more 

complex than its framing. Both challenge any attempted framing as incomplete. History by 

suggesting causal links and the Bible by manifest intertextuality. On the other hand, the facts 

causally relevant to a historical event in one way or another are infinite while those relevant 

to a narrative are (usually and ideally) contained in the work. 

44 See II Kings 25:9, 25-26

66 MAKOM 67 

About the Editors 

Gabriel Shapiro – Editor-in-Chief (gshap@uchicago.edu) 

Gabriel is a third year in the College. For two years before he began at the Universtiy 

of Chicago, he studied Talmud, Bible, and halakha at Yeshivat Har Etzion in 

Israel. At UChicago Gabriel is majoring in Fundamentals and minoring in Math. 

His question—Fundamentals is organized around a guiding question—is about religion, 

philosophy, and happiness. During winter quarter, Gabriel will be writing on 

Anna Karenina for his Fundamentals Junior Paper. Apart from his work on math, 

happiness, and Makom, Gabriel works as a research assistant for the Committee on 

Social Thought. Just in case you can help, Gabriel recently realized that he wants to 

know more about psychoanalysis, al-Ghazali, and philosophy of language. 

Doni Bloomfield – Managing Editor (dbloomfield@uchicago.edu) 

Doni is a third-year in the College at the University of Chicago, majoring in history. 

His interests include research into free banking in the American West, the 

economics and halakhot of kidney donation, and the literary approach to Tanach. 

In addition, he does research for Wall Street Journal reporter Greg Zuckerman and 

works on various projects with University Theater and Fire Escape Films. 

Jonathan Nathan – Academic Editor (jnathan@uchicago.edu) 

Jonathan Nathan is a sophomore at the University of Chicago majoring in History 

and Law, Letters, & Society. He is especially interested in theology, grammar, law, 

nineteenth-century America, and prose-embedded blank heroic verse. Jonathan grew 

up in New York City, where he attended the Fieldston School. He has spent the last 

two summers working at a boys’ camp and exploring Maine and New England. 

Dory Fox – Layout Editor (dory@uchicago.edu) 

Dory is a fourth-year in the College of the University of Chicago, double-majoring in 

Jewish studies and English. Her main academic interest is twentieth-century American 

Jewish literature. She is also interested in representations of Jews in Western literature 

and art, and in the intersections between Modern Hebrew and Yiddish literature. 

Dory spent the Summer of 2012 as a Steiner Summer Student at the Yiddish Book 

Center and as a literary intern at The New Republic. She is writing her Bachelors thesis 

on The Yiddish Policemen’s Union by Michael Chabon. 

About the Contributors 

Jon Catlin 

Jon is a second-year in the College of the University of Chicago double majoring 

in Jewish studies and the College’s “Fundamentals: Issues and Texts” program, in 

which students use close readings of texts to answer a fundamental human question 

of their choosing. His Fundamentals question is, “What is the human response 

to catastrophe?” which he is investigating by studying literary and philosophical 

responses to the Holocaust in comparison to those of other catastrophes in history. 

He divides his time between writing and editing for The Chicago Maroon and The 

Midway Review and teaching philosophy to elementary school children on Chicago’s 

South Side through the program Winning Words. This summer he plans to study 

Polish language and Polish-Jewish literature in Kraków, Poland. 

Zara Fishkin 

Zara is a senior at Tufts University, majoring in English with a minor in Mass 

Communications & Media Studies. She is currently a copywriting intern at Hill 

Holliday, and is a former student of the Yiddish Book Center’s Steiner Program. 

Her interests include cause marketing, advertising, the history of fairy tales, and 

intercollegiate quidditch. 


Michael is a fourth-year at the University of Chicago, where he majors in philosophy 

and political science. He is currently writing a thesis on political obligation, though 

his interests span a number of fields. Outside of academia he has worked for the 

Congressional Research Service and for the Obama campaign, and is an avid Scrabble 

player. 


Michal is in her final year at the University of Cambridge. She is studying Theology 

and History of Art and is especially interested in the intersection of these two fields. 

In her free time she volunteers for the Fitzwilliam Museum’s education department 

by giving talks about the collection in schools that cannot afford to make the trip to 

the museum themselves. She also edits visual arts material for The Mays, an anthology 

of creative work by current students at both Oxford and Cambridge. 

Kayla Kirshenbaum 

Kayla is a senior at Queens College in New York where she studies English literature

68 MAKOM 

About the Contributors 

and drama theater. Amongst other prizes, her writing has been awarded the Zolot 

Prize in poetry and the M. Hratch Zadoian Essay Prize in Holocaust/Genocide 

Studies. Kayla studied in Rome for half a year where she kept an online blog and 

food journal. Her primary interests include Victorian poetry and its literature, and 

she looks forward to pursuing a higher degree in creative writing. 

Avi Levin 

Avi, a native of Seattle, is a junior majoring in Applied Mathematics. Before coming 

to the University of Chicago, he spent three years in Beit Midrash at the Pacific Torah 

Institute in Vancouver, Canada. He currently serves as President of the RSO Student 

Alliance for Jewish Enrichment. In his spare time, he enjoys reading, programming, 

traditional Jewish study, and Halo. 


Leah is a senior at Harvard University where she studies American History and 

Literature. She is currently working on a thesis entitled “Reforming the Incorrigible: 

Jewish Delinquent Girls and Social Reform in New York City, 1900-1925.” She 

spent this past summer as a Steiner Summer Student at the Yiddish Book Center. An 

emerging singer/songwriter, she also sings for The Nostalgics, a Soul and Motown 

band. 

Eric Singerman 

Eric is a second year in the College of the University of Chicago, majoring in 

philosophy. He was raised on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. He came to 

UChicago to read the books he couldn’t understand by himself. So far, it’s going well. 

He loves to eat, cook, write, and read. 

The Chicago Center for Jewish Studies 

is pleased to support 

Makom: The University of Chicago’s 

Undergraduate Journal of Jewish Thought. 

Among its many programs, the Center: 

• administers the major and minor in Jewish Studies 

• sponsors academic events on campus 

• offers Jewish Studies internships to undergraduates 

through the Metcalf Fellows Program 

For more information about the Center, please visit: 

http://jewishstudies.uchicago.edu.

70 MAKOM 

MAKOM 

STAFF 

Editor-in-Chief 


Managing Editor 

Doni Bloomfield 

Academic Editor 

Jonathan Nathan 

Layout Editor 

Dory Fox 

Faculty Advisers 

Ariela Finkelstein 

Paul Mendes-Flohr 

UNIVERSITY 

OF CHICAGO 

Makom is now accepting submissions for our Spring 

2013 Issue. To submit an article or work of art, please 

email it to us at: makomstaffers@gmail.com 

www.makomuchicago.wordpress.com 

makomstaffers@gmail.com 

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